Sponsored Review: Apogee Search
Disclosure:
This is a paid review which I am doing as a Review Me participant. Although there will potentially be a financial gain from this review, this post will not be biased in favor of any potential financial gain.
Apogee Search is a Search Engine Marketing firm founded in 2001 by McKinsey & Co. alumni. The main focus area of the firm is affiliate marketing and pay-per-call. The main goal of Apogee is to direct targeted visitors to B2B and B2C websites.
Services:
So, what services does Apogee provide? In layman’s terms, the goal is to bring people who do a search on a search engine to a website where what they are looking for is potentially sold. The buzzword complete description of that is “qualified leads from ready to buy customers”. For that to happen, from what I understand, you get in touch with a representative who analysis your website for search engine marketing. The search engine marketing analysis service is supposed to be free. If you accept, Apogee positions itself as a partner to you and “help you get the most from your marketing dollar and quickly raise your search marketing revenues to the next level”.
I can hear you being confused about my tone about the service here. It is not that I don’t see any value in such services. I am sure search engine marketing is a big part of the traffic to a commerce site and being discovered among many similar websites is very important. So, I think that such a service should be valuable for a website who wants to attract potential customers.
Apogee seems to provide six different services:
- Paid Search Advertising: Pay-per-click campaigns. Mainly translates into Google Adwords.
- Natural Search Engine Optimization: Plain SEO.
- Pay Per Call Management: This service kind of turns customer clicks to voice meaning customers are directed to seller’s phones and they pay as they are called.
- Affiliate Marketing: Seems like Apogee brings affiliate partner sites together with their client to increase their revenues.
- Search Engine Marketing Training: This is interesting since they claim to give hands-on instructions about SEM best practices.
- Search Engine Marketing Analysis: As I mentioned, this is a free service where the client’s website is analyzed for search engine performance.
Website:
Apogee Search website contains some information about search engine marketing among all those buzzword compliant advertisement clich?s.
One thing that I really liked about the website after my inspections is that they provide many documents that could help the customer answer some questions about SEO and SEM. They also provide an article called “Avoid Search Engine Marketing Malpractice” to warn clients for not falling into such a malpractice. Another interesting article that attracts attention is the “PPC: Do You Want to Play Inside or Outside?” which discusses outsourcing pay-per-click campaigns.
Their current blog also gives a positive image to them.
Conclusion:
I tried to review the Apogee Search Engine Marketing firm. Although I have not tried their services and I am not a potential client for them at this point, I tried to write up an objective review trying to understand if they would be a useful partner. It is difficult to make that assessment without trying but the fact that they provide many downloadable resources to help the client understand the concepts of the partnership made me feel they are worth a look if you are looking for such a service.
[tags]sponsored review[/tags]