Posted by Rene LeMerle

SEMPO (The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization) has released it’s annual State Of Search Engine Marketing Report. The 2010 report confirms that Search is continuing its meteoric rise.

The North American search engine marketing industry is expected to reach $16.6 billion by the end of the year. This will represent growth of over 13% from 2009 – which was about $14.6 billion.

And there’s no prizes for guessing who the dominant search engine is. Google of course, and by quite a significant margin.

According to the 1500 agencies and marketers surveyed, 97% currently advertising on Google (71% in Google’s search network) – with only 50% using Yahoo! and 44% advertising on Bing.

SEO vs PPC?

It seems the proportion of businesses who include SEO in the marketing mix has remained relatively unchanged at 90% (which reinforces the perceived value of SEO in the search marketing mix) – but PPC has continued to grow – reaching 81%.

And in the coming year – budgets are on the increase across the board. SEO expenditure is set to grow 43% and PPC will increase by 37%.

Social Media

It seems that while Social media usage and marketing appears to be on the increase – it hasn’t been reflected in budgets up to this point – with 23% saying the social media marketing budget was zero.

But 2010 will see this change. 59% of respondents are set to increase their social media marketing budgets – and for many – that will mean their first formal investment in the space.

All in all – it’s encouraging to see how consistently search engine marketing performed over the global crisis and how it looks to be bouncing back even further as industry confidence grows.

I would hasten to say that traditional media and marketing reports are significantly less optimistic.

What’s your plans for 2010?

• Will you be increasing or decreasing SEO and/or PPC spend?
• What about Social media? Do you already invest in SMM or do you plan to?

Comments

This entry was posted on Monday, March 29th, 2010 at 8:30 am and is filed under Search. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

About the Author: Rene is the marketing manager of ineedhits.com - a global search engine marketing company. He also leads the marketing for Gooruze.com - a web 2.0 style community for online and digital marketers. Rene has been in the industry since 1997 with much of that time spent helping businesses embrace the best of the internet and digital world.