Companies are beginning to embrace SEO as a legitimate means of marketing, but they often throw a paltry amount of marketing dollars towards it, or they allocate most or all of the search budget to PPC only. That is a mistake, even for companies that don’t sell products or services online. Let’s take a look at some interesting statistics that will help show how important it is for companies to concentrate significant resources towards ranking well in the search engines’ organic rankings, which are the natural listings returned on the left side of the search results page.

Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Analytics Evangelist and author of “Web Analytics: An Hour A Day” hosted an invitation only event at Google’s Atlanta office in January, 2008. He told attendees that only 14% of Google clicks come from paid search (the sponsored listings on the right side of the search results page, also known as PPC ads) while 86% of clicks are organic. Clearly, just from this one statistic alone, we can see how important it is to allocate resources towards natural, organic ranking through search engine optimization.

But let’s not stop there. Now let’s look at a couple of other interesting stats. According to an iProspect survey, only 10% of users will go past the first page of search results, and 90% won’t go past the third page. Obviously, the first 10 results are where you want to be!

And two final stats for you to think about:

• In report after report, it’s been found that 70 – 80% of consumers research product information online before purchasing – either online or offline!
• In addition, consumers who researched products online via searches spent 20% more than non-searchers.

So to put that into perspective, 80% of consumers who might buy your product or service, research online first. Of that 80%, 86% will choose from the natural, organic listings, and almost all of those will choose one of the top 10 listings on the first page of results. Once they buy, they spend more than those who didn’t search online. Now, how important do you think it is to rank in the top 10 for your product or service, even if you only sell off-line?

Marketing experts have always understood the importance of using various marketing techniques such as print ads, direct mail, press releases, etc. to cement the brand in consumer’s minds. SEO should be a significant portion of that marketing mix if they hope to reach today’s tech-savvy consumers.

Statistics obtained via:
Marketing Charts, Beussery.com, Prospectiv, and iProspect.