Companies increase commitment to search engine marketing
Companies have been ramping up their investment in local and mobile search as part of an increased commitment to search engine marketing.
According to the 2011 SEM Benchmark Report published today, a third of agencies (34%) say their clients are typically involved with mobile search, a significant increase from 22% last year.
The research also found that just under a third of companies (30%) carry out local search, up from 27% last year, while a further 21% are planning to do so.
Agencies report more widespread usage of local search than client-side respondents, with 62% of supply-side respondents saying their clients target by locality. This is a 2% increase from 60% in 2010.
The research found that 14% of companies now spend more than £100,000 on SEO annually, and 3% spend more than £1m.
When quizzed on pay-per-click (PPC) investment, two thirds of advertisers (67%) indicated they had increased their budget for Google over the past year, compared to only 12% who have decreased their investment in this search engine.
Increased investment in Google has come in spite of the fact that 59% of companies and 79% of agencies report that Google keyword prices have gone up in the last year.
The majority of client-side marketers say that, over the last year, their companies have also increased their PPC investment in Facebook (65%), LinkedIn (62%) and YouTube (55%).
The report also shows that on average 22% of marketing budgets are spent on search engine marketing. More than half of client-side marketers say they expect budgets for both SEO (59%) and paid search (53%) to increase in the next year. The equivalent figures for the 2010 survey were 60% for SEO and 52% for paid search.
The proportion of companies planning increases in social media investment jumped significantly in 2010 (compared to 2009) but has fallen slightly this year. Some 63% of companies say they plan to increase social media budgets in 2011, compared to 65% in 2010 and 48% in 2009.
Some 88% of agency respondents said they expect their clients to increase budgets for social media over the coming year, compared to 62% who expect increased budgets for SEO.
Just over a third (37%) of agencies said they expect increased paid search spending by clients.