British companies reaping benefits of SEO

More than two-thirds (68 percent) of U.K. companies that took part in the study saw returns in excess of 300 percent. Forty percent experienced ROI’s of 500 percent or more.

Not surprisingly, the strong returns have boosted business confidence in search engine marketing, with six out of ten companies intending to increase budgets for this activity over the next twelve months.

Other key findings of the U.K Search Engine Marketing Report include:

- 87 percent of search engine marketers said their organisations paid to advertise on Google, compared to 45 percent for Yahoo, 33 percent for MSN, 11 percent for MIVA and 6 percent for Ask.

- More than half of respondents (56 percent) said that their companies spend in excess of $20,000 on paid search annually. A quarter of respondents (25 percent) reported spending more than $200,000 annually.

- 62 percent plan to greatly increase investment in SEO for natural listings.

- Respondents spent, on average, 32 percent of their marketing budget on online marketing.

While Google is, in many respects, viewed as the best search engine, over half of respondents thought that Google has an unhealthy dominance of the U.K. search marketplace.

“Google’s dominance in the marketplace is seen as a two-edged sword,” said Linus Gregoriadis, E-consultancy’s Head of Research. “On the one hand, the fact that Google generates such a high proportion of the search volume means that many advertisers feel they can focus their efforts on this search engine with good returns. On the other hand, an over reliance on Google is seen as a potential risk to businesses. Many advertisers would like to see more competition from the other search engines.”

Tags: e-Consultancy, Google, search engine optimization, search marketing, SEO