SEO is the Bread, SEM is the butter

by Daniel on Jul.31, 2009, under PPC, SEM, SEO, Work

In today’s topsy turvy world we see many people trying to figure out the “magic sauce” for making a long term profitable website. I have been reading some really good article around the web about how a disproportionate amount of money is being spend on SEM (PPC and other SEM tech) compared to SEO. Some of the numbers are mind boggling to me and I’m really confused at why something that gets 75% of the clicks to generate traffic only gets 15% of the Online Budget and something the generates < 25% of the traffic gets over 80% of the budget.

Here’s a Google heatmap that shows what people are actually looking at:

Google Visual Heat Map

You will notice that a vast majority of the customers are on the left side of the screen, and the ppc ads on the right are only showing green/blue vs. red and orange.

I couple of months ago at my office I began looking at our SEO and created a presentation for my manager to describe what I thought we needed to do in order to become more solid in SEO. I was happy to hear that about two months later the same issue was being brought up from our SVP. The information from the deck was given some Bling by my manager, and presented up the chain. I’m very fortunate that not only is my manager a good guy, but he also knows SEO well, and he’s been able to champion it and answer the questions as they were fired at him. This is great because SEO is a fundamental change in how most organizations in product development operate.

While I helped turn around and develop SEO Strategy for another $1billion retailer, I believe the opportunites I’ll have here will be far greater since the potential increase from fixing the basics is in the $10’s mm. Some times a company can feel like a big ship and it takes a lot to steer the titanic out of the way of an iceberg, but fortunately there are no icebergs, only great opportunity to improve things. I’ll be posting some more about basic things we’ll be working on, and what type of results we see. Also I do believe that PPC and SEO are both required for success, but SEO can bring a lot more bang for your buck in the long term, not just the short.