Good news for those of us in the SEO industry as new figures from Forrester predict spend will increase steadily over the next 5 years.
The chart below shows the predicted increase in spend for the US – it’s fair to assume the UK market will follow the same trends.
According to the report interactive marketing will near $55 billion and represent 21% of all marketing spend in 2014 as marketers shift dollars away from traditional media and toward search marketing, display advertising, email marketing, social media, and mobile marketing. This cannibalization of traditional media will bring about a decline in overall advertising budgets, death to obsolete agencies, a publisher awakening, and a new identity for Yahoo!
Although the figures are pleasing it’s hard to see how PPC spend can increase much further in developed markets. Most clients we work with running maximum budgets to gain every click possible and a lot of markets are already saturated.
Natural search on the other hand has huge potential because of the large disconnect between the amount people are happy to spend on PPC and the amount they spend on SEO. In some industries brands are spending 10-20 times as much on PPC as SEO and yet natural search drives over 75% of all search traffic.
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.
The big difference between PPC and SEO is the ability to easily broad match across loads of keyphrases – with SEO you need to work on difficult things like building up trust and expanding content using an intelligent site structure. It’s far easier (and perhaps even cheaper in the short term) to just buy keywords than to create tens of thousands of optimised landing pages.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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By the way, this obviously means that by 2014 the search results are going to be massively competitive so now is the time to invest in SEO, don’t wait until everybody is spending twice as much.
More comments from Patrick AltoftThanks for sharing. I would tend to agree w/your comments regarding PPC saturation. While SEO may not be cheap, it is getting more and more cost effective relative to PPC, which in many cases has reached a point of little to no ROI. It will be interesting to see how all of this develops over time.
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In terms of our Business, it’s certainly heading towards that the large majority of clients are interested in SEO and taking up our SEO packages, so it’s no real surprise that this will be a market that continues to grow.
More comments from Creare-Website-DesignI am feeling good
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I have a newbie question that I’ve had in the back of my mind for a while.
If a company pays a lot for PPC ads, and gets lots of hits, do those hits translate – in Google’s eyes – to the company appearing higher up the list for those keywords in natural search?
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@David – No, they are totally separate.
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For smaller organizations, I think PPC simply serves as a keyword research tool. Once you identify the keywords that convert, redirect the funds to SEO projects and boost organic rank.
I would like to see SEO vs. PPC pertaining to the following:
Average conversion rate
More comments from TheSmallBizNestAverage cost per acquisition
Average value per customer
ROI
I suppose this is both good and bad news. good that the internet economy is set to grow but bad as this means more competition.
More comments from HubtonomyIt is good to hear there’s still plenty of room for growth but i agree with PPC saturation, the cpc is only going to keep increasing , therefore generating a good roi is going to become more difficult especially in sectors that are already pretty established. Although on another note, a friend of mine operates a niche site and it’s cheaper for him to run ppc ads for some terms than seo because the cpc rate is so low…how long that continues for is anyone’s guess, but this instance is probably a minority.
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Never knew that there is so much budgetary gap between paid searches and SEO.
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Great news as far as I am concerned about increased SEO! In my ghostwriting services, I write for many SEO and internet marketing firms and their clients. It’s always good to know you have job security. Thanks for the awesome information.
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more and more that we shall start using the SEO now.
More comments from joabngEconomic Boom once again and so the people will soon have prosperity but it is not always as if we have to take the chances. In SEO and paid searches issue, there is indeed a wide gap in terms of payment and also of the work given or executed. Thus, it is far more important to look very closely on this matter especially if you are new in the business because success also depends on the backbones of your business. Without market, there will be no business.
I tend to agree. We have seen a massive increase in PPC and SEO.
My PPC spend for our website is going through the roof. I am throwing more money at online and reducing my print expenditure. I agree with the above forecast
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