Paid Search is Getting Expensive

I've been doing my year end recap to measure performance year over year and its been another prosperous year for our clients. The one thing that jumped out was the rise in PPC costs. I collected terms from each of the campaigns we run and compared costs year over year. Its amazing to see the increase. On average, the CPC rates rose 23% and some individual terms rose as much as 85%!

Some of these terms are brand specific terms and others are generic terms that are important to the business. This trend isn't totally alarming because CPC costs have been steadily rising over the psat few years. Analysts have predicted paid search campaigns would be much too costly for the small guys within the next 3 years.

This leads me to develop a new strategy for 2008 that involves an increase in SEO. My clients' marketing budgets can go a lot further if SEO is beefed up and a focus is put on improving organic ranks for critical terms. Doing this will allow me to use paid search as a supplement for those critical terms and divert money into other profitable channels.

Good luck to you in 2008 and start thinking more about SEO.