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July 07, 2004
Seth Says No To SEO
Certified marketing guru Seth Godin, who gets oodles of respect from this reporter, has taken a swing as the practice of SEO. While it's only fair to note that he's already put his comments in context, it's still worth knowing what he said, and the opposing viewpoint (offered by Aaron Wall).
Seth basically says that SEO is a 'black art' (which is very true) and concludes that PPC is a more fair and rational system. Perfectly logical. Except that only approximately 20% of all clicks go to PPC ads. So if you ignore organic search you're missing 80% of the potential for any given keyword.
(BTW: I can't site a linkable documentation of that stat right now, but I've heard numbers surrounding 20% quoted directly out of the mouths of numerous search engine mucky-mucks. How's that for attribution. Anyone care to link some real proof?)
Hi Craig.
I was at the NYC SES conference. They stated that 35% of total search was commercial in nature.
Of the subset of commercial searches 5 out of 6 purchases that originated from search came from the organic listings.
http://www.seobook.com/archives/000189.shtml
Posted by: aaron wall at July 7, 2004 03:09 PMThanks Aaron. I definitely heard 15% in one of the sessions, I believe the one with the Sales VPs from both Google and Yahoo. Whatever the number it's a minority. Your second stat validates the idea even more.
Posted by: Craig Danuloff at July 7, 2004 03:47 PM