Sherpa SEO Seminar

[Steven Herron]

I sat in on a Marketing Sherpa seminar on SEO practices today. As usual the material was very good and would apply to general SEO and hotel specific. The data presented was developed through nearly 2,000 survey responses from SEO firms, consumer surveys, lab tests and partnered research, Sherpa Case Studies, and "Best Of" data from Partner Research Organizations.

The revealing points were:

49% of budgets were "inflexible" - meaning they were set and not adjustable to demand even if sales were high

Despite astounding data on the ROI of viral marketing nearly 40% never use it

Organic clicks dominate search with PPC clicks averaging 4.5% on Yahoo, Google, and MSN/LIve while Organic clicks average 94% for the same search engines

[Ron Callari]

Thanks for the clarifiction.

[Steven Herron]

Good question Ron, I should have clarified that on the blog. In this survey it is the SEO budget that is inflexible. It became an issue if the budget included PPC and that item's ceiling was reached the client went "dark" even if a specified time period was not. This was the case even if conversions were high.

It demonstrated a need to constantly evaluate performance and not set the entire budget once a year, once a quarter, or even once once a month. Putting money into a discretionary budget item would seem appropriate.

[Ron Callari]

Steven, when you say 49% of budgets were "inflexible" are you referring to hoteliers that will not add SEO to their budgets or shift other spending to accommodate SEO?