Why Don’t Marketers Spend More on SEO?

If you read our last post about the research in interactive marketing based on Forrester Research, you’ve seen that there will continue to be a significant increase in spending on interactive marketing for the next five years.  In fact, by 2014, interactive marketing will represent 21% of all marketing investment.

So, then, why does pay per click garner so many more dollars than an investment in SEO?

In fact, SEO drives more than 75% of all online traffic, yet garners only 15% of marketing budgets for search engine marketing campaigns.  Pay per click, on the other hand, garners 80% of marketing budgets, yet only drives slightly less than 25% of the overall search engine traffic!

The obvious answer is that it’s time consuming, and costly, to design optimized landing pages for all of your keywords and getting into the market quickly with pay per click is an easy thing to do.  In the short term, before all those new landing pages are indexed, you’ll make more from pay per click anyway.  Plus, with pay per click, it’s far easier to match key phrases and easier to directly track the results back to the boss.

Nevertheless, the statistics are alarming.  And, I’ll bet you are re-thinking your marketing budget right now.  Now, just how do you sell it to the boss?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 at 2:06 am and is filed under Internet Statistics, search engine optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.