It's no mystery why search engine marketing works. It's the first place people turn when they want to find something on the web. Which brings us back to our first question, why don't more companies realize this? Let's look a few numbers to see how few people actually use search engines as a marketing channel.
 
Overture currently has 67,000 active advertisers. Based on our research, over 90% of companies that have a search engine marketing strategy also use Overture. Using a little quick and dirty math, let's assume that about 70,000 to 75,000 companies have a search engine marketing strategy of some kind, even if it's just using pay per click engines like Overture. Sounds like a lot, right? But let's compare it to the number of businesses with websites.
 
There are almost 10 million unique websites in the world (according to oclc.org) and it's estimated that about 60% of these are commercially oriented websites. That's 6 million websites that probably are meant to be found by their customers. So, currently, only about 1.25% of all website owners are considering search engines at all in their marketing strategies. Even if we restrict it to North America and Europe , less than 10% of website owners have included search engine marketing in their plans.
 
Here's a common scene that we see played out at least 4 or 5 times a week. We ask a company if they have a search engine visibility strategy. Nine times out of ten, the answer is no. They have no idea where they rank on engines, what words they rank for, or how much traffic they're getting. "I've never really thought about search engines," is the usual comment. Then we ask them what they do when they're looking for information on a product or service online. "I go to a search engine." Why, we ask, would you think your customers are any different?