Many, many moons ago, I had the opportunity to work for an enormous yellow page corporation as an advertising sales consultant.  We helped small and medium-sized business devise online and offline advertising programs, and we measured their results via metered phone lines.  The results were interesting.  We learned the relative effectiveness of ad positioning, color, type, syntax, and other variables by conducting analytics on their programs.

In the directory book world, there are two types of ads:  Directional Advertising (the white pages and the alphabetical listings of the yellow pages) helps repeat customers or referred prospects find specific companies.  Creative Advertising (graphical advertisements within each particular heading) helps comparison shoppers weigh the relative qualities of various service providers at once.  In a simple study (which very likely may have been skewed by our corporate office in our favor), we found that 64% of customers used the creative display advertisements while 36% of customers used the directional listings.  These results may be unexpected to those of us who are quickly desensitized to pay-for-placement advertisements.

Search engines have all-but-replaced published directories when it comes to Directional Advertising.  PPC listings can be likened to yellow page displays while algorithmic (or natural/organic, if you prefer) results are similar to the alphabetical phone book listings.  As marketers decide how to allocate their resources between search engine optimization and pay-per-click programs, how can make the right choices with regard to ROI?

For the majority of search terms, both SEO and PPC are bringing a lot of companies great ROI.  However, SEO just seems like a no-brainer, doesn't it?  (WebTrends customers who use Web Position Gold may be a credible source on this subject.)  Today, the results of a study by iProspect and JupiterResearch showed that 35% of marketers show better results from SEO than PPC (while 11% found the opposite to be true).  I have not read the entire study, but I wouldn't doubt the results.  The SEM bubble can't keep growing and growing forever. For those of you who are looking for a couple of quick SEO tips, you're in luck:

1) Launch a corporate blog.  Let's follow this thought logically.

• Search engine optimization is dependent on relevance.
• Blogging is a way of easily posting relevant content.
• Thus, blogging enhances our amount of relevant content.
• So, blogging dramatically impacts SEO.
• And SEO is a proven method of acquisition marketing.
• So, why would any marketer go another day without launching a blog???

2) Have blogs for various parts of your business.  See my previous post on "The Personification of Blogging."  A blog does not have to surround a particular person or a specific point-of-view.  You can have blogs about each of your stores, campaigns, causes, events, product lines, partners, designers, brands, etc.

3) Be your own best affiliate.  Remember the days when we would laugh at the Internet squatters who bought up every possible variation of every domain known to man?  To a certain extent, owning multiple domain names is not a bad way of beefing up your "if-I-do-say-so-myself" referrals.

4) Check out some of the SEO providers out there.  There are only a billion of them, and they are less expensive than you think! Some ones that come to mind are Newgate, Web Advantage, TrafficLeader, iProspect, OneUpWeb, MoreVisibility, and Submit Express (okay, I've never heard of these guys either, but they came up #1 in Google under "Search Engine Optimization", so they must know something about the subject, right?).

5) Build a culture around SEO improvement.  We tend to meticulously measure the programs where we spend the most money.  How about measuring the efforts that bring us the best ROI?  If your company is unaware of your algorithmic ranking on key search terms across major search engines, take some time to figure it out today.  Then, make it a point to talk about your SEO improvement with your team every couple of weeks.  Although it takes a while for optimization changes to make an impact, a simple report to your team every two weeks can go a long way.