SEO服务

There's a big disconnect in the way marketing dollars are allocated to search engine focused campaigns. Let me highlight:

Not surprisingly, search advertising should continue to be the largest category, growing from $9.1 billion in 2007 to $20.9 billion in 2013.
- Source: C|Net News, June 30, 2008

OK. So companies in the US spent $10 Billion last year on paid search ads, and even more this year. How about SEO?

SEO: $1.3 Billion (11%)
- Source: SEMPO data via Massimo Burgio, SMX Madrid 2008

According to SEMPO's data, it's 11% for SEO and 87% for PPC (with another 1.4% for SEM Technologies and <1% for Paid Inclusion). Here's where I get confused:

 

That looks to me like most of the eyeballs are on the organic listings - the ones you can only influence with organic SEO... Huh? Maybe we should get more data on this subject. Let's turn to Enquiro:

Organic Ranking Visibility

(shown in a percentage of participants looking at a listing in this location)

Rank 1 – 100%
Rank 2 – 100%
Rank 3 – 100%
Rank 4 – 85%
Rank 5 – 60%
Rank 6 – 50%
Rank 7 – 50%
Rank 8 – 30%
Rank 9 – 30%
Rank 10 – 20%

Side sponsored ad visibility

(shown in percentage of participants looking at an ad in this location)

1 – 50%
2 – 40%
3 – 30%
4 – 20%
5 – 10%
6 – 10%
7 – 10%
8 – 10%

Fascinating. So visibility is considerably higher for the organic results. What about clicks?

Thanks to Comscore, we can see that clicks on paid search results has gone down over time, and is now ~22%.

Conclusions: SEO drives 75%+ of all search traffic, yet garners less than 15% of marketing budgets for SEM campaigns. PPC receives less than 25% of all search traffic, yet earns 80%+ of SEM campaign budgets.

Questions:

• Why does paid search earn so many more marketing dollars?
• What can SEOs and the SEO industry do to help bring parity to this equation?
• Does a down economy mean SEO will be given greater opportunity to perform?

I'll save my opinions for later, but would love to hear yours.

Posted by randfish

 

davidtowers:
Rand,"PPC receives less than 25% of all search traffic, yet earns 80%+ of SEM campaign budgets." - I think the reason for this is that PPC is easier for companies to grasp than SEO... You make a good point, we have some work to do!

I think part of our work as SEOs is to educate our clients of the ROI that SEO can have. If we can demonstrate clearly that the work we do for them has a higher ROI than paid search they will try SEO out and as they see the ROI, they should logically increase budgets.

What we are seeing in our agency is that because of the down turn in the economy, companies are asking us to work on their SEO because they see it as a wiser investment in the longrun. We keep needing to tell our clients that although SEO has a higher ROI in the long run, short term gains are seen quicker with paid search.

On a side note, while I agree with you that SEO doesn't have the share of marketing spend it should have, I think the enquiro study you've shown is a little misleading... When sponsored results are on the left above the organic results they have a higher visibility than 50%.

Japh :
It seems to me the main reason companies spend more money on PPC is that they seem to think they have more control.  They spend more money, they get more visibility.  We know it doesn't quite work that way, but I think that's the mentality.

In reality, if we do a better job at educating, then they'll hopefully realise that not only is SEO better in the long-run, but if you spend more on SEO you get more bang for your buck with SEM!!

Surely that reasoning would help our clients justify the spend to their bean-counters too  ;)

Darren Atkinson:
My opinion is that the reason for this massive gulf in spending is that to a business, PPC advertising is guaranteed.

Businesses who do any kind of research or talk to people know that with PPC they can pay a certain amount and be guaranteed to have their ad shown to potential visitors which generates a certain amount of traffic.

With SEO there is no such guarantee, any business investing in this route has to have much more trust in their chosen SEO company than they would in their PPC management company.

One further reason which I also think adds to this gulf is the fact that PPC is far easier to implement. It may be tricky to implement well, but on the whole PPC campaigns don't require looking into site architecture, linking policies, content optimisation (well not to the level that SEO requires!), etc...

tom29:
We have a similar situation in our company. SEO is seen as the little brother of PPC and isn't given as much time or resources. It is true that businesses like to see cold hard figures and PPC can provide this better than SEO. The article is really interesting but as someone else has said, a bit misleading with out sponsored listings appearing above the natural ones.

jaamit :
I agree with many of the comments above re PPC being percieved as an easier route to search traffic.

I think the main difference comes down to ROI tracking and conversion analysis.  With PPC I suspect it is much more standard practice (and easier with built in conversion tracking on all the main PPC platforms) to measure where every single penny is going and what kinds of return your investment is giving.

The problem with how the majority of SEO campaigns are performed (and I have been as guilty of this as anyone) is that its success is measured in vague terms such as rankings and traffic. If conversion analysis and ROI reporting was done to the same level of detail for SEO as it is for PPC, I think you would start to see a big shift happening in terms of clients being willing to invest in PPC because you would see such fantastic ROI figures!

A lot of this can be achieved by proper analytics and setting your conversions and proper ecommerce tracking.  However the obstacles to doing this properly for SEO are:

the initial investment is bigger than PPC, and the results take a while to show, so it's not as instantly accountable
a good SEO campaign can be bringing in results for years to come! While this is a definite plus of SEO over PPC, it makes it harder to quantify its value
nothing is guaranteed so you can't make accurate predictions on ROI
However I do think that the economic slump will push more investment towards SEO due to its "free traffic for life" USP.

作者：风采依扬
原载：SEO服务
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