Last week Google announced that their Q4 revenue in the UK surpassed $1 billion. While this didn’t impress Wall Street a great deal it does show that ad spend in the UK search sector is very healthy indeed. See a breakdown of international numbers here. Another interesting stat that was corroborated widely by many PPC agencies was that the number of clicks rose significantly in the fourth quarter yet the amount they charged per click fell by 8%. So what does all this mean to the SEO industry?

In my opinion SEO is still very much the poor neighbour of the search market. SEO traffic is often viewed as “free” traffic which simply isn’t the case, it needs budget to deliver outstanding results. The fact that you can measure the ROI similarly often also lands on deaf ears. Adwords, it seems, is an easier sell yet in most cases a solid SEO campaign will deliver far more ROI than a similar budget placed in PPC. A client may not get full value in the first month but once the traffic intersects it keeps growing unlike the fairly flat curve that a PPC campaign often generates. I’m not going to turn this into a SEO vs. PPC post though, they both work. (more…)