Paid search is simple, right? You just chose your keywords, write your ad, decide how much you want to spend and voila - you’re getting traffic… and paying money. Whereas search engine optimization is hard. The search engines can’t let you know exactly what you’ve got to do to rank well so you have to do a lot of research to find out what works and what doesn’t work. It’s different for every search engine, it’s changing and there’s a lot of information out there that’s wrong. If you don’t want to do it yourself you can hire an agency.

The Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization (of which SLI is a member) recently released a survey on search engine marketing spending that found advertisers in US and Canada spent $5.75 billion in 2005. 83% of that was on paid placement. This underscores, not that search engine marketing is easy to do - but that it’s easy to spend money on.

Doing paid search well is difficult because there are so many options and you need to track them all. The optimal ad creative, landing page and price could be different for different combinations of search engine, keyword, product, geography, time (of year or of day) and for search vs content ads. You could be optimizing for immediate sales, life time value of the customer, obtaining market share or something else.

I suppose the point I’m trying to make is that paid search and search engine optimization are both difficult to do well but it’s a lot easier to spend money on paid search and that’s one of the reasons why search engine marketing spending is dominated by paid search. In my opinion the percentage spent on search engine optimization should increase over time because there is at least as much value there as in paid search. One of the challenges for those in the industry is to make it easier to spend money on SEO.

The good thing about SEO is that none of the money an SEO company charges goes to the search engines. So there is a lot more money to be made when compared to paid search. Many companies are comfortable with spending large amounts on paid search - because it is performance based. Performance based SEO services, such as Netconcepts’ GravityStream, YourAmigo, or SLI’s Site Champion service will help ensure that more of that search engine marketing spend goes on SEO.

This entry was posted by Shaun Ryan on Monday, January 23rd, 2006 at 3:38 pm PST and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.