I have just gotten off the phone from the president of an interactive marketing firm. His words were, "once or twice a year we have a client who wants us to do search engine optimization. Can you do that for us?"  The quick answer is yes...but the important question is, "Of the dozens or hundreds of clients you deal with, only one or two in a year think about search engines?"

Not considering search engines in marketing is only part of the problem, however. Even companies who are aware of search engines have some misconceptions about the effectiveness of traditional search engine optimization.

Yesterday, I got an email from the Product Manager of a major online domain registration service. I quote, "It was mentioned that Google's search now powers over 80% of the web. With this being the case, it seems that now more than ever, search engine optimization and paid inclusion is a waste of time. Google seems to be un-optimizable as you have to be a quality site and build links. Optimization firms can't do much to improve a Google ranking.With this being the case, and with all other search engines both loosing searches and having paid results above their searches, isn't it safe to say the SEO will be a thing of the past moving forward?"

No! Sure, your chances of fooling a search engine into giving you a great ranking are pretty slim. But to say search engine optimization is dead is like saying public relations or word of mouth is dead. None of these things are easy or a quick fix, but they work!

How People Use Search Engines

It's no mystery why search engine marketing works. It's the first place people turn when they want to find something on the web. Which brings us back to our first question, why don't more companies realize this? Let's look a few numbers to see how few people actually use search engines as a marketing channel.

Overture currently has 67,000 active advertisers. Based on our research, over 90% of companies that have a search engine marketing strategy also use Overture. Using a little quick and dirty math, let's assume that about 70,000 to 75,000 companies have a search engine marketing strategy of some kind, even if it's just using pay per click engines like Overture. Sounds like a lot, right? But let's compare it to the number of businesses with websites.

There are almost 10 million unique websites in the world (according to oclc.org) and it's estimated that about 60% of these are commercially oriented websites. That's 6 million websites that probably are meant to be found by their customers. So, currently, only about 1.25% of all website owners are considering search engines at all in their marketing strategies. Even if we restrict it to North America and Europe, less than 10% of website owners have included search engine marketing in their plans.

Here's a common scene that we see played out at least 4 or 5 times a week. We ask a company if they have a search engine visibility strategy. Nine times out of ten, the answer is no. They have no idea where they rank on engines, what words they rank for, or how much traffic they're getting. "We've never really thought about search engines," is the usual comment. Then we ask them what they do when they're looking for information on a product or service online. "I go to a search engine." Why, we ask, would you think your customers are any different?

How SEO Works

Now, to our second point. Why not just use Overture and Google's AdWords and forget about SEO? Let's look at some basic realities of web search. People do not go to search engines for paid listings. If they did, Overture would be the most popular search engine in the world, rather than pulling in less than 2% of all search portal traffic. Google is the most popular search engine, and, not coincidentally, they have never compromised the quality of their search returns. Any sponsored links are clearly identified and are removed from the main search listings. People go to search engines for relevant, unbiased search results.

Consider search engine optimization the same as you would word of mouth advertising, media exposure or public relations. It's exposure that comes with a very high degree of credibility and trust. Traffic coming from traditional search listings tends to have high conversion rates.

There's another advantage to traditional search listings. They are considered unbiased and non commercial. We have seen traditional search perform very well at certain points in the buying process. When consumers are gathering information about a purchase, they show a marked preference for traditional search listings. When they are ready to buy online, they seem to have less bias against paid placement listings and the likelihood to click on one of these listings increases.

There's only one drawback to traditional SEO. It's not an easy strategy to control. Given the number of relevancy variables that search engines employ, it may be impossible for you to achieve high rankings for some terms. On the other side, you may get rankings for keywords that have little or nothing to do with your product or service. For instance, www.searchengineposition.com currently ranks #2 for "stepping over the line" in Google. While some who know us might dispute the fact, the phrase doesn't really describe what we do.

The Cost of SEO vs PPC

Perhaps the most compelling reason not to exclude SEO from your online marketing strategy comes down to dollars and cents. Tracking we use on some client sites allows us to compare the costs of SEO (consisting of our fees and various inclusion and submission fees) directly with the costs of PPC and other forms of online advertising.

For one client, the average cost per visitor for SEO was $0.21, vs $0.88 for PPC. The conversion rate (the percentage of visitors taking a defined action on the site) for SEO was 20.19% for SEO visitors, compared to 4.49% for PPC. That gave us a cost per converted visitor of $1.04 for SEO, compared to a cost per converted visitor of $19.65 for PPC.

For another client, the average cost per visitor for SEO was $0.07, compared to an average cost per visitor for PPC of $2.73. The conversion rate, in this case favored PPC (because of rankings for some irrelevant rankings picked up in search engines), with 2.29% for SEO vs 4.35% for PPC. And the cost per converted visitor was $2.86 vs $62.69 for PPC.

If you want to compare SEO vs Banner Advertising, the one example we have (the majority of our customers don't use banner advertising) is pretty startling. The SEO costs were $0.07 per visitor (same client as in previous example), the conversion rate was 2.29% and the cost per converted visitor was $2.86. The cost per visitor for the banner ad was $3.13, the conversion rate was 1.67% and the cost per converted visitor was $187.42!

If those numbers aren't convincing enough, consider that SEO traffic will keep coming day after day, month after month, even if you don't actively continue optimizing and submitting your site . The minute your PPC or banner advertising budget runs out, the traffic stops.

Why It Should Be a Foundation

I always recommend using search engine marketing as the foundation of your marketing program. It's the first thing you should do. After all, doesn't it make sense to ensure that the customers that are actively looking for your product of service can find it?

Search engine marketing can also act to leverage your other marketing. You can realize a greater return on the investment you make in brand awareness advertising such as sponsorships, TV and radio by taking a small amount of your budget and directing it to search. For example, a company could sponsor a NASCAR race team. When NASCAR fans turn to the internet for standings and other information through search engines, that same company could spend a relatively small amount and ensure they dominate listings for NASCAR terms. That way, when fans turn to the web for anything related to NASCAR, they’re accessing that information through a branded site that also includes links to individual product information pages. Search acts to combine the advantages of brand awareness with a much more comprehensive and informative marketing message to interested consumers.

Imagine the power of a marketing campaign that gave you the ability to ensure that your company name would show up near the front of the yellow pages listings for any category related to your products or services, anywhere in the world! This is the power that an effective search campaign can bring to your marketing strategy.

The Nearly Perfect, Completely Invisible Site

One of the questions asked by our skeptical product manager was if it was still possible at all to influence search engine rankings? Yes, by simply giving the search engines what they want to see.

The vast majority of site designers have no idea how search engines work or what their capabilities are. They have other goals in mind when designing their sites, such as:

• Presenting the site in a interesting and unique way.
• Getting the maximum impact from the available screen real estate.
• Using available design techniques to get their message across.
• Handling content in an efficient manner.

All very important objectives, but often at cross purposes with effective "search engine friendly" design.

Designers will often use Flash, java or DHTML navigation tools, frames, dynamic content management or other techniques to get the most out of their site design. Each of these presents a challenge to search engine spiders. Over 95% of the sites we look at have not even considered the basics in search engine friendly design during their construction. Spiderable content is completely hidden from search engines.

Ironically, the bigger the company and more well known the product or service, the more likely it is that the site will use techniques that will create problems for search engines. These are the companies that are spending millions on advertising their products, but are putting road blocks between motivated consumers and the information they're looking for through search engines. It's these sites that search engines typically want to rise to the top of the listings. In these cases, a little search engine expertise can go a long way.

Why Wouldn't You Want a Great Site?

There's one more advantage of search engine marketing. The better the site and more extensive the content, the more likely it is that you'll be found not just for your primary keyphrases but also for hundreds or thousands of secondary keyphrases. Using our site as an example, while the majority of our search traffic comes from phrases like search engine positioning and search engine optimization, we also get hundreds of visitors every month from dozens of other phrases.

This incremental traffic doesn't have the same conversion rates as the traffic that comes looking for your main words, but it's also free. It costs you nothing but a little bandwidth to accommodate these extra guests, so every sale or conversion that comes from it is a bonus.

Yes Virginia...there is SEO

... And it will last as long as people want to find objective, unbiased information on the web. It lives in the promise of engines such as Google, and the new, improved search engines yet to come. It lives in the preferences and requirements of the users of the web. And it lives in the hearts of search engine marketing firms like ours. What a dull, dreary, commercialized online world this would be if there were no free search listings.

Yes, the search industry will continue to consolidate and current players that are on life support (such as AltaVista) will probably disappear from the landscape. Google and Overture, as the first search services to find viable revenue models, will prosper. And as the industry grows and becomes more profitable, more services with better defined business models will fill the space and compete with Google and Overture.

But as these new services come on board, they will have to meet the need for free, relevant and objective search results. Search users have always been consistent in their demand for these results and those that have ignored the message have done so at their peril. And as long as there's a need for free search, there's a need for search engine optimization.