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Continued Reluctance from Agencies to Pursue Search Marketing
To most, it seems like a perfect fit--traditional advertising agencies joining forces with (or purchasing outright) PPC providers and organic search engine marketing services.
However, the average agency is scared to death of search engine marketing services in any form (although some forward-looking agencies have finally jumped on the search engine marketing bandwagon). The reasons are simple: accountability and metrics.
Advertising agencies have for years made money based upon a percentage of what a company spends on advertising
This model has been the accepted norm for decades. However, it raises some ethical issues. What is the motivation for an agency to recommend decreased spending on non-performing initiatives? Moreover,
what reasons does an agency have to report on the effectiveness of each of its campaigns? (If an agency's clients dug deeply into any such metrics, they would likely reduce their advertising spend based on the performance
of individual campaigns.) Many PPC service providers have adopted this model, even though the goal of a PPC campaign should be to monitor the metrics of a campaign to decrease the spend (eliminating underperforming keyphrases, for example).
Good search engine marketing services offer metrics that scare traditional advertising agencies. If these agencies were to present such metrics to their clients, those same clients may start
to demand similar metrics for other campaigns (television, radio, magazine ads, etc.). Until the "percentage of spend" model is altered, large agencies will continue to reject search engine marketing services and will not recommend them to their clients.
Continued Focus on Google for Organic SEO
In general, where Google goes, other engines will follow. Smart search engine marketing services will continue to optimize for Google, which currently accounts for half of searches in
the United States (7). However, instead of trying to trick Google by unraveling the latest, ever-changing algorithm, search engine marketing firms will instead need to use the "piggyback" approach. This approach entails
learning from the extensive studies that Google conducts of its users (learning by observing the commonalities of the types of sites that consistently rank highly) and applying those same attributes to client websites. In this way, search engine marketing firms not only make sites
better for Google, but also for users. As other engines try to close the relevancy gap in search engine results, search engine marketing firms will be rewarded as the tactics they have used for Google success become the accepted industry standard.
Conclusion
The use of search engine marketing services is still a new, "unproven" channel to many companies. Even so, it is changing the way that many traditional advertising agencies must do business.
With PPC costs on the rise, and the effectiveness of the PPC channel coming into question, more companies will investigate the hiring of search engine marketing firms using organic tactics for their Internet marketing needs. Smart companies that outsource organic or PPC advertising will
no longer say "what have you done for me lately"--they will say "prove what you’ve done for me lately." Search engine marketing services that are on top of the curve will be more than happy to do so.
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