It seems that lots of marketers are now looking for traffic sources “beyond Google,” at least for SEO in the sense that they want free traffic. Much hype is surrounding the idea of niche social networks, consumer-generated-media, and “tagging” as an additional place to get site traffic. It’s really more like another way to do viral marketing that should not replace paid marketing efforts. Yes, innovatively getting placement/mentions in the social media (e.g. shared bookmarks like del.icio.us, links from myspace pages, links from other blogs, etc.) helps, but it’s supplemental. I certainly don’t hear a death toll sounding for paid online marketing.

Paid search marketing in particular, at least not for the foreseeable future, will not be going away. Google and Yahoo!, the top two search networks with a PPC advertising model, still receive billions of searches per month – and have hundreds of thousands of search engine marketers vying for those searchers’ eyeballs.

Search is still a huge source of traffic for e-commerce sites. Unsurprisingly, analyses done by Hitwise have shown that over 10% of all traffic referred to e-retailers comes from search engines. Web users are just accustomed to going to Google (or another engines,) and “magically” finding what they need within a few mouse clicks.

I would argue that social media is not necessarily used by people who are actively shopping for a product or service. If somebody wants to buy something, they either go to an online store they know, or they head straight to their favorite search engine and run a search for the item they want. Granted, social media (through inbound links, etc.) helps Web sites with small amounts of traffic as well as organic search engine rankings. If your organic rankings improve, that could contribute to getting more of those visitors from all those the Web searches. But relying on SEO alone is a gamble, since you never know what efforts in SEO are going to pay off. Especially given the near-monthly fluctuations in search engine algorithms. In paid search, you are guaranteed a placement – as long as you are willing to pay the per-click price to attain your position.

If anything, paid search is growing and, as time goes on, becoming more complicated. In addition to Google and Yahoo!, everyone knows about MSN’s adCenter and Ask’s Sponsored Listings offering a pay-per-click keyword marketing model. And we haven’t even talked about the “second tier” networks such as Enhance and Kanoodle. Consider also the expansion of search into the mobile arena, and deeper into the local markets. And then there’s shopping engines and vertical search engines. Not to mention Microsoft’s new demographic targeting.

Wow. You think your search marketing campaigns are complicated NOW?

Posted in: Default | Search Industry Trends