Look how old this is! I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 17 years 20 days ago. This industry changes FAST, so blindly following the advice here *may not* be a good idea! If you're at all unsure, feel free to hit me up on Twitter and ask.
My trip to Los Angeles for the Search Engine Strategies local conference was a real eye-opener for me as to how many big (and not so big) corporations view the Internet.
Amazingly (to me) there are huge companies paying no attention whatsoever to organic search engine optimization, while spending tens of thousands of dollars on Internet Yellow Pages, banner advertising, and pay per click. To many of the people I met, organic just wasn’t important, even though it a far larger source of traffic than any paid options.
My own theory is that this happens because with paid options, everything is trackable down to the dollar and the click, so measuring ROI is much simpler. Organic traffic just skews those figures, since it’s harder to justify what those clicks actually “cost”. Therefore, lets just ignore organic completely… Makes sense, right? 😉
I still learned a lot, and I’ve posted my “nuggets of knowledge” roundup of the entire conference over on the SEMpdx blog –
SES Local Los Angeles – Day one roundup
SES Local Los Angeles – Day 2 & 3 roundup
Scott, thanks for posting the SES Local roundups. Did not get to attend even though I live in LA. Hoping to see you at Pubcon and hear your thoughts.
More room on the net for the rest of us small fish.
I was thinking, maybe organic search has a higher risk factor for these large companies. The more words they publish, the higher chance they have of getting sued for something or saying something to make their product less appealing so maybe clicks are worth the extra bucks in terms of saved lawyer bills or lost sales. It is harder to go wrong with 10 words on a pay per click ad then 400 x ?? pages on organic search.