Re: SEO versus PPC - the unending debate
I completely agree with Cliff and David (great posts from both) in that
you really need to balance all three. The best and most effective
campaigns will have a sensible mix of Paid Inclusion, Paid Placement and
Organic. With the right tools (like strong bid management technology and
campaign monitoring) -- and some hardcore elbow grease -- you really can
strike a good balance that will work for most budgets. (And if anyone's
interested, we actually have a white paper on this exact topic.
Granted, I'm not an expert in search, so I did forward the post to Steve
Curtin, one of our VPs/search gurus. He had this to add to the topic:
"No surprises here...
We have seen MSN moving towards "search independence" over the past 2
years as they first developed the MSNbot and began crawling the web as
part of their R&D. Then there was the World Economic Forum in 2003 where
Gates admitted that "[Google] kicked our butts" in search and declared
that "we [MSN} will catch them!"
(http://www.alwayson-network.com/comments.php?id=P2725_0_2_0_C).
January of 2004 also saw the expiration and non-renewal of the Looksmart
directory results agreement then in July they kicked out Yahoo! paid
inclusion (while keeping the natural). More recently we saw the news
that MSN was Yahoo!-free for natural listings. So, what's left? Overture
paid inclusion is the last dependence that MSN has in search and their
contract with Yahoo! expires in mid 2006 - count on MSN ending that
relationship in early 2006.
According to Comscore Google has 35%, Yahoo! 32% and MSN 16% share of US
searches. It's a no-brainer that the overall search pie will continue to
grow and I expect that Google will stay in the lead as MSN takes away
share primarily from Yahoo!, and the little guys will be relegated to
small niche markets. News for advertisers...just another channel to
manage."
Aimee Kessler Evans
Marketing & Public Relations
DigitalGrit
More Effective Web.
973.316.9696 x165
www.digitalgrit.com
***DigitalGrit: One of the Best Places to Work in New Jersey!
Received on Fri Mar 18 2005 - 13:47:11 CST
