SEO Is Dead? How? It Hasn’t Even Been Born Yet! More Crazy Shots From Algo-holics

The argument that SEO is Dead is preposterous! New stats from SEMPO show that not only has SEO not even hit yet, but the SEO fetus is still growing. According to SEMPO, the North American SEM industry grew from $9.4 billion in 2006 to $12.2 billion in 2007, exceeding earlier projections of $11.5 billion for 2007 and SEO only accounts for a mere 10.5% as part of the pie. How can something be dead that hasn’t even been born yet?

In fact, my prediction is that SEO and Organic traffic awareness is likely to increase as most small to mid-size business owners can’t afford spending thousands per day on PPC as their larger competitors do. PPC definitely has its advantages, but how should we as Search Professionals expect an emerging competitor of Dell for instance to outspend and compete with the mega giant that is spending more than $200k day on PPC. The best alternative to the PPC craze is definitely SEO and new and up and coming businesses should take advantage in an industry that is growing at a record pace.

Need another reason as if trying to outspend the big boys doesn’t sound intimidating enough? Organic traffic converts better than its PPC counterpart. The majority of retailers, almost 1/2, maintain that natural search delivers better sales conversions than PPC. Organic needs to be put in the spotlight a little but more, however with the major SE’s getting $0 from Organic and Billions from PPC, this is still not realistically going to happen in the near future unless Google and Yahoo buy their own SEO company like Microsoft has.