Search Engine Marketing Industry In Denial

By Author: Mel Joelle
Total Articles: 4328
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This is the first in a series of posts that I will be making to offer my reflections on The SES (Search Engine Strategies) Conference in New York last week. The 3 day agenda included 5 tracks of presentations and discussions as follows:

* Search & the Fundamentals
* Search & the Fear Economy
* Search & the C-Level Executive
* Search & Measurement
* Search & the Future

The conference was well attended by many corporate advertisers as well Search Engine Marketing Companies. Although I have been in the industry since 2005, this was my first attendance at an SES conference.

I found several of the presentations to be very worthwhile on a number of levels and I will be sharing them on future posts. While I could only attend one presentation at a time, all of the presentations will be posted for registered attendees and I will be viewing those in the days to come. I hope to share with our readers certain relevant insights and information along the way.

One thing I can say for certain. I was really kind of shocked regarding the continuing huge ...
... emphasis on Google Adwords and Paid Search. By itself, this didn't really bother me; however, the combined lack of emphasis on organic search, relatively speaking, made we wonder if the industry is in some form of denial.

Here are the facts as presented even here at SES New York. Paid Search is commanding 88% of the online marketing dollar while paid search usage represents only 10-15% of the market. In other words, 85-90% of searches result in an organic click and NOT a paid click, yet 88% of the dollars are chasing the paid clicks.

Those of you familiar with Optimum7 and the wealth of content on our site and on our blog can probably understand where I am going.

It appears the industry, as a whole, continues to focus on the least productive piece of search marketing (PPC or Paid Search) while not grappling with the hard work and realities involved in Organic Search Engine Marketing. It appears that, as a group, that don't want to deal with it. Here are the reasons:

1. It involves a massive commitment to content.

2. It involves patience as the results are almost never immediate.

3. It involves hard work to make the website work in the eyes of Google for ranking purposes.

4. It's a hard sale to prospective clients because results are neither immediate nor guaranteed AND involve significant commitments beyond the financial ones.

5. It involves strong skills and processes that go well beyond the web page.

It just comes down to a restatement of what is obvious. Everyone says they want to be on the first page of Google, but very few are actually willing to do those things, make those commitments to actually achieve first place organic rankings.

So, this energizes me more than ever. We are so focused on getting strong visibility and bottom line results for our clients that the hard work isn't hard at all because it's a labor of love. Nothing excites us more when we achieve page 1 results for clients and concurrently see the traffic graph move from the lower to left to the upper right.

Bookmark or follow me on Twitter or Facebook or just RSS this blog so you know when you can view the next post of my impressions in this series on the SES New York Conference.

Don't forget your comments are always welcome.
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