iskandarX Society SEO - The Rise And Rise Of UK Search Engine Marketing

The UK search engine marketing sector is vibrant with SEO and Pay Per Click agencies hot on the heels of the US in terms of rapid growth, and there are no signs of it slowing down.




According to www.whoisagap.com a website which monitors the qualification levels of Pay Per Click professionals around the globe, the number of Google Adwords Qualified Advertising Companies in the UK which currently stands at 73 has only recently been surpassed by the US at 89, and for quite some time the UK was leading in terms of qualified companies.

Adding further weight to growth predictions in the UK, online publisher E-consultancy have recently forecast that UK spending on Search Engine Marketing will increase 58% this year to £2.22bn(approx $4.46bn). They have estimated that the value of paid search alone will near the £2bn mark this year, reaching around £1.97bn (approx $3.96bn) up 56% from 2006. But for the first time, spending on organic search will grow more quickly, increasing 68% to £252m (approx $507m).

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These forecasts reflect the findings of a recent report produced by E-consultancy in association with UK-based search agency Neutralize (*\*). The survey which is based on the responses of over 700 agency and company internet marketers shows the UK search marketing landscape is a lively one.

The report, the most comprehensive UK-based study of its kind, found that 60% of UK companies are increasing their budget for paid search in the next 12 months, while 62% will be making more investment in search engine optimisation (SEO) to increase natural search engine visibility.

Spend in the search marketing arena seems to have become ingrained in companies’ marketing budgets with some 56% of UK respondents stating their companies spend more than £10,000 (approx $20, 200) annually on paid search and a quarter of UK respondents (25%) reportedly spending more than £100,000 (approx $202,200) annually.

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When it came to the relative importance of paid search and SEO both company and agency respondents believe that SEO is more important than paid search in terms of impact on brand. Historical research from E-consultancy and other sources has suggested that SEO represents between 10% and 20% of total search engine marketing. The new report uncovers that company respondents spent on average 33% of their search budget on SEO (with 61% on average going on paid search).

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The figures are certainly reassuring and show that positive attitudes towards search engine marketing are continuing. However, as always there’s room for improvement and issues such as rising PPC cost affecting search ROI issues with tracking of ROI and leads.

Some 43% of company search marketers said increased PPC costs was significantly impacting their return on investment from search. Despite this, for paid search, half of respondents who know their return on investment say they are getting returns in excess of 300%. Just under a quarter of respondents (22%) say they are getting an ROI of 500% or more.  For SEO, the returns can be even greater. Two thirds of respondents (68%) are getting a return in excess of 300%. Some 40% of respondents are getting a return of 500% or more.

Despite this success, the survey also revealed a lack of measurement around return on investment (ROI). Four out of ten company search marketers (43%) do not know their ROI from paid search and 61% do not know their ROI from SEO, the survey has shown.  The report clearly shows that the number of respondents who are not effectively tracking their ROI from search engine marketing outweighs the number of people who are doing so, both for paid search and for SEO.

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Over recent years the UK online marketing scene has unsurprisingly been dominated by Google with the likes of Yahoo! and MSN trying to keep with their rival’s unprecedented success. The overwhelming consensus from survey respondents was that Google is the best search engine across the following five criteria: return on investment, quality of traffic, volume of traffic, customer service and PPC management tools.

Some 80% of company respondents who expressed a preference said they rated Google as the best search engine for return on investment compared to 11% for MSN and 8% for Yahoo!.

However, the survey results were not all good news for Google. More than half of the UK company respondents believe that Google has an unhealthy dominance of the UK search engine marketplace and 60% said that its dominance represented a risk of some sort (including low risk). Some 22% of company respondents said that Google’s dominance was “a risk” and 9% said it was a “high risk”.

Linus Gregoriadis, E-consultancy’s head of research, said: “Google’s dominance in the marketplace is seen as a two-edged sword. On the one hand, the fact that Google generates such a high proportion of the search volume means that many advertisers feel they can focus their efforts on this search engine with good returns.”

So it would seem that the future is bright for search engine marketing in the UK. For those of you interested in delving deeper into this new research the report is available to download for free at http://www.neutralize.com/search-engine-marketing-report/.


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Other key findings:
• The four paid search services most commonly used by companies using agencies are as follows: Keyword research (50%); ROI tracking and analysis (47%); Automated bid management  (33%); Landing page optimisation (31%).

• The four SEO agency services which responding companies are most likely to be using are as follows: Position monitoring (41%); Keyword research; (40%); Search strategy definition (36%); Site technical audit (34%).

• On average, company respondents say that they spend 32% of their total marketing budget on online marketing. On average, they spend a third of their online marketing budget on Search (32%).

• Overall, respondents believe that SEO is more important than PPC in terms of impact on brand.

•  According to company respondents, lack of internal resource is the biggest problem preventing success for both Paid Search and SEO.