Search Engine Marketing Data

North American advertisers spent $9.6 billion on search engine marketing in 2006. I do not have the current worldwide numbers. I wish I did have worldwide numbers for this report. 84% of this $9.6 billion was invested in paid search. E.g. Google Adwords, Yahoo and MSN PPC, etc.

So only 14% went to natural search engine optimization (SEO), Yahoo's paid inclusion scam accounts for 1% or $96 million. We hope the FTC stops Yahoo from this paid inclusion scam against the general public and gives Yahoo a huge fine for this advertising scam.

1% for agency fees and in house development account for 1%.

So my question is why is natural SEO still such a low percent of the total. I think it will increase in the future as Google's PPC prices have gone though the roof. Keyword terms that we used to pay $2 for are now $10. At some point people will start to shift more of their Internet marketing dollars to SEO I think. 75% of businesses use some SEO efforts to promote their businesses. For many years people have said they want branding however they generally are still more focused on measuring direct response rates. TV advertising , print ads and newspaper advertising have been dropping and Internet marketing and advertising are growing, we see a significant shift of how corporate budgets are invested. We predict this trend will continue for many years, as the Internet is still a young child.