We still come across many companies spending millions of dollars in press advertisements every year, even though they know and admit the readership has dropped significantly, as with other forms of advertising and marketing. They also agree that they have no indication of who viewed their advertisements, let alone what sort of a response they received from it.

SEO has a complete different result and outcome, yet unless you were in the Australian SEO industry you would probably not consider this as mainstream advertising, have a look at one of my earlier blog posts The smarter way to go for advertising agencies.  There is still a strong misunderstanding or a strong lack of knowledge among traditional marketing managers and sadly enough traditional advertising agencies.

When you talk about SEO or take them an SEO proposal, they will more than likely look at you and say. This looks interesting but we are doing paid search, we are on top of search engine listings and it brings us good results. Or they may even claim that they don’t use their Web site as a form of marketing but an information source. They will then look at your proposal which factors some information on optimisation and link building, then look at the price and will more than likely say, let's talk about this next year we do not have the budget. Or we have not factored this type of strategy into our budget. Many will ask, can you guarantee results, or can we do a month trial period. Some others will even tell you, 'That is great but, what do you mean by SEO? Not many will ask what are the benefits of SEO, and how can this improve my business objectives.

The potential for companies to market their products and services online is enormous. With the World Wide Web growing at an exponential rate, (there are currently in excess of 14 billion Web documents in Google alone), increasing at a rate of roughly 7 million per day. Every day, Web users utilise the major search engines to launch over 400 million queries for products, services and information. So unless you are involved with and SEO specialist and you are doing something serious to make your Web site appear more visible than the millions of others competing for attention, your site will simply be lost in the crowd.

Additionally, at least a third of Internet users believe companies found in top search results are a major brand in their specific product/service category, indicating that top rankings translate to 'brand equity'. So why are these advertising agencies that call themselves brand specialists not including this in their clients marketing strategies? Why when approaching marketers in well known and traditionally well branding companies not noticing the importance of SEO?