Survey claims that search-engine marketing still remains strong

The medium of search engine marketing, both SEO and pay-per-click (PPC) remains a strong and successful source of traffic and sales for online retailers. That is according to an Internet Retailer survey conducted in April 2010. The survey included 102 consumer brand manufacturers, web-only retailers, catalogers and chain retailers.

According to the survey, 27 percent of respondents said that search engine marketing is responsible for over half of their online sales. 47 percent said that more than a quarter of their web sales stem from search engine marketing. This figure includes sales driven by both SEO and PPC driven sales.

As far as traffic was concerned, 51.5 percent of respondents claimed that more than a quarter of their web site traffic comes from natural search whilst 28 percent said that more than a quarter comes from paid search advertising.

A massive 89 percent of respondents said they get at least 50 percent of their search engine traffic from Google, with 19 percent saying Google sends more than 90 percent of the traffic they get. The survey did not specify if that includes traffic from both natural and paid searches however.
There were some interesting figures that relate specifically to paid search and Google vs. the Yahoo!/Bing partnership.

44.6 percent of respondents said that they were able to increase their budget for paid searches in the last year, and 49 percent said that they are planning to increase it for 2011 too. Almost half, 43.4 percent said they plan to shift some of their paid search advertising to Microsoft’s search Bing in the coming year. And of that 43.4 percent, 17.6 percent said they will be shifting money from their Google advertising budget.

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