SEO-The growth ahead | Internet

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The fact has already been established! Companies cannot do without keeping their websites in the higher echelons of Google and Yahoo. Maintaining a higher rank in Google and Yahoo requires them to continuously keep their sites optimized for search engines. In a recent study done by SEMPO State of the Market Survey, it was found that in the year 2007, the North American Search Engine market grew to $12.2 billion which exceeded the analysts expectation of $11.5 billion. It is expected that the growth will continue and the industry will reach figures of $25.2 billion by the year 2011. The survey which was conducted on a total sample of 867 advertisers found that 89% of the advertisers engage in SEO. Another interesting fact is that spending on SEO and PPC marketing are almost at the same level. Some years ago, PPC marketing was far ahead of SEO. However, all is not happy in the SEO scenario. Though SEO spending is on the rise, most of the spending is being done in-house. Only 4 out of 10 advertisers are satisfied with the services offered by SEO firms. So can we say that the SEO provider is in for tough times? It needs to be understood that if you are interested to generate money from your website, the web infrastructure needs to be search engine friendly and the web content needs to be optimized. Websites have to maintain a recurring expenditure on SEO initiatives.

Website owners are offering more quality content and are even putting up micro sites in addition to their major sites to offer niche content and also offer podcasts, videos and other promotional contents for their website. If the present approach to search engine optimization continues, we are going to see a constant demand for SEO services. As the industry matures we are seeing a fair amount of SEO work being outsourced to low cost destinations such as India. This trend is most likely to continue. The bigger SEO firms in America are going to see a fairly steep rise in business revenues because larger advertisers would always want to work with firms of repute.

Here are some more interesting statistics on the SEO story. In a study conducted by MarketingSherpa and Merrill Lynch, the total SEO spending in the United States rose by 177%. Though some companies are not satisfied with the SEO work done by agencies, some 33% of the total sample of advertisers felt that engaging an external agency to do SEO work does have its own set of agencies. SEO agencies have a broader skill set of search engine marketers who try out a variety of SEO skills if one does not work. If a company tries to do in-house SEO work, it may not be possible to deploy a wide range of SEO skills. The respondents said that in-house SEO work increased rankings by 38% while agency optimized SEO work increased rankings by 110%. As a result companies would continue to use SEO agencies to get their websites in the higher echelons of the search engines.

About the Author

The author is a management graduate from one of the leading business schools in India. He runs a search engine marketing company IntelligentQ (http://intelligent-q.com)

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