Frederick Marckini, CEO of iProspect, said that the paradox of Web search and search engine marketing (SEM) is that properly optimized sites contain customer-specific language. “Who is talking about the language of the customer?” asked Marckini. “Only search engine marketing firms.”

Both “natural” search engine optimization and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising bring traffic. SEM firms optimize for both types of online promotion, yet all of this traffic results in conversion to buyer rates of only 2-3 percent.

Therefore, SEM firms must not only research how people are searching, but where they are searching for specific things. “When the context of the brand demonstrates the intent of the query and then the corpus of documents is restricted by topic,” Marckini said, “that search will yield an improved result.”

Paid Inclusion and Pay-Per-Click Programs

“The paid inclusion industry really started with Inktomi,” said Dennis Buchheim, Director of Inktomi Search Marketing Solutions. “It has proven to be an excellent business for us and has provided a lot of great opportunities to marketers and has been a price-leader.”

Buchheim believes that the core value of search engine marketing really has a lot to do with content in both Inktomi’s flat fee URL Submit and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) trusted feed programs.

Buchheim predicts that we will see tools every day: more search engine automation, both on the bid management and paid inclusion, more tools for submission, tracking, conversion/ROI tracking. “There is a lifetime relationship being formed with the customer, and everybody needs to remember that with the ROI process,” he said. “The tools are getting better and better, and becoming more significant.”

Chris Bolte, Strategic Alliances and Sales at Overture, said that the big trends he sees revolve around how many customers he sees coming online. “Overture has doubled from 40,000 customers a year ago to 80,000 today,” he said, “and that’s just a segment of the total market. We expect that trend to continue big-time going into 2003 and beyond.”

Big-name brands are jumping online in a big way. As these clients get online and start testing search to see the true marketing value, especially compared to their other (traditional) online marketing vehicles, expect to see much more of the share go to search engine marketing, he said.

David Fischer, U.S. Manager for AdWords Sales & Operations at Google, said that Google has come a long way from 1996. “We are projecting 5-8 years from now that this market will really expand – increased number of tools, increased levels of sophistication, and so forth. There is a much bigger world out there that we can educate and open up to all this space and have them be a large part of this growth.”

Fischer believes that Google has only scratched the surface so far. “We have had $5-6 billion in total online advertising spending this year,” he said. “Direct marketing still spends 8 times that amount. We must continually communicate the effectiveness and advantages our [search] industry to direct marketers and ad agencies.”