A recent survey by MarketingSherpa of over 2400 in-house marketers and over 700 marketing agency executives found search engine optimization (SEO) to be the second most effective tool for generating ROI, right behind email marketing. Good news for all those start-up internet marketing agencies.

But a closer look at the numbers revealed a slightly different story. Although 36 percent of respondents rated SEO to have good ROI, another 21 percent slammed it as hard to gauge. The result was that SEO also placed third, out of seven marketing tactics, for least effective.

Why would a tactic heralded as being on the cutting edge of internet marketing, and praised for it's ROI also be criticized for being hard to gauge? There are a few reasons, most of them related to the relatively short period of time SEO has been used as a marketing tool and the trepidations most business owners feel when paying money for a relatively new strategy with graduated pay-off.

Measure This.

There still isn't a good, solid analytics tool that can separate SEO leads from SEM leads. Google Analytics, wildly popular because it is effective and free, only measures return from SEM leads, and most other high-level analytics tools, like Click Tracks for example, inevitably mix up SEO and SEM. Frustrated business owners who couldn't get solid numbers about SEO versus SEM probably contributed to those who judged SEO "hard to gauge."

Time, time, time.

Getting on the first, or even second, page of Google for a popular key word takes serious time, effort, and patience. After all only 10 websites in the entire country are capable of getting on the first page of Google for a specific keyword or phrase. Return on investment, in the form of a higher profile or better leads, may arrive within two months, or take over a year. In fact, any good report on SEO's ROI should evaluate expenditure and profits on an annual basis, rather than going month by month.

The Size factor.

Companies with the time and resources to wait things out see a tremendous jump in profits thanks to SEO. Smaller companies who become frustrated part-way through the process or who lose the ability to fund SEO or who choose a cheap and ineffective SEO company are less likely, or, rather, not likely at all, to see the fruit of their investment. This factor is also probably the reason that MarketingSherpa's survey found that 43 percent of "Big Spenders" (companies who spend more than $25,000 per month on SEO) plan on increasing their SEO budgets at least 11 percent next year, but only 35 percent of all respondents surveyed were willing to do the same.

Youth.

At the end of the day, SEO just hasn't been around that long. People like the idea of it because it is cutting edge, but the flip side of cutting edge technology is that it often hasn't had time to really prove itself. Businesses praise SEO's obvious advantages (zero cost per click, long-term rankings, no constant bidding wars) but feel less sure when it comes to paying up front costs that will give birth to results at some distant point in the future. There are no standards in the industry, no rules, and most of the literature on SEO is available on the internet, in opinion articles and through blogs.

Is SEO an effective tool? YES. We can't say it enough and the stats speak for themselves. According to Forrester Research, 93 percent of Internet users use search engines and 97 percent of those users never get beyond the first three results they find. Not only that, but thanks to an ad-averse culture, 76.7 percent of internet users use the organic, rather than paid listings. But search engine optimization is not cheap and not easy. Anyone who promises you first page status for 500 bucks a year is lying. So count the cost, research the benefits, and prepare for an exciting journey.

About Blueliner

Blueliner is an internet marketing agency and web development firm specializing in web design, search engine optimization, online advertising, web analytics and social media campaigns. Visit www.bluelinerNY.com for details, or contact Dali Singh at dsingh@bluelinerny.com.