Whether search engine marketing is an important part of your online arsenal is beyond question. Google alone, with around two-thirds of the U.S. search market, warrants specific consideration. For IT manufacturers and solution providers, search engine marketing can be particularly challenging because competition is fierce for fairly specific search terms — both for products and vendors and for the IT issues that you seek to resolve for your clients. The latest research from MarketingSherpa reveals the priorities of search engine marketers.

The fact that most marketers cite increasing competition for natural search rankings (38 percent) is hardly surprising. Ultimately, this space involves jockeying for the front page above the fold on search results. There’s a similar dynamic in paid search, where competition is also hot, accounting for the 34 percent response rate.

Tracking offline conversions garnered a 28 percent response rate, suggesting that the turf battles are more important for search engine marketers, as they have more control over driving results once they’ve attracted users to their sites. Keyword price inflation and ROI tracking finished close to each other, at 25 percent and 24 percent respectively. They are related, as pricing impacts the ROI hurdle. Click fraud attracted only 12 percent of responses, which shows that marketers are focused first on the marketplace and winning visitors to their sites, an aggressive posture.

[Source: MarketingSherpa]