Almost 5 percent of paid search spending in the US is now in mobile, according to a report released last week from banking and investment firm Macquarie Group, using Efficient Frontier data. That mobile search spend could double to almost 10 percent by the end of this year if growth continues at an aggressive pace.

Using some very rough math that would mean US mobile paid search could be worth approximately $1.1 billion (at least) by the end of 2011. And almost all that money would be Google’s.

Google Market rate Paid search on mobile

Just as Google dominates mobile search share in the US (with roughly 98 percent), the report said that 97 percent of mobile search spend (for Efficient Frontier clients) now goes to Google, while 3.2 percent spend goes to Bing/Yahoo.

Article by Greg Sterling from Search Engine Land

Read the full article here

We have to answer those questions from clients all the time: shall we start Search Engine Optimization (S.E.O) before Paid Search? Or shall we start Paid Search before S.E.O? What are the benefits of doing both simultaneously?

On one hand, common sense dictates that you may want to have your web site in order before starting to invest in online advertising.  Typically S.E.O is a good place to start: Having your  pages well designed, indexed and relevant to the user will improve user experience and online conversion. It will also boost your quality score (i.e. Google’s assessment of the relevance of an ad to the landing page) and therefore decrease you keyword bids.

On the other hand, Paid Search can be a powerful way to test keyword popularity and advertising messages. Customers’ engagement levels, as demonstrated by Click Through Rates (CTR) and on-site behaviour will give some insights into your S.E.O strategy.

Happily married.

In our mind, Paid Search and S.E.O. are a happily married couple. Both disciplines work well together. We have tried to highlight the benefits of running those initiatives together:

1. Click Through Rates lift

Various pieces of research from Forrester and other SEM agencies have shown that the appearance of a web site links in both natural and paid search (‘sponsored results’) sections of search engines produced an incremental 15 to 20% Click Through Rates. It appears that having an ad reinforces the idea that your web site is legimitate and encourages more visitors to click on the natural link.

2. Unified reporting

As highlighted above, customers’s insights from one area can inform decisions to the other. From a S.E.O. standpoint, your Omniture, Google Analytics, webtrends and other anlaytics will provide an idea if what search queries are entered by visitors to your site. Those will be used to create your Paid Search strategy and keyword categorization. From a Paid search standpoint, be on the look for highly performing ad copies that will indicate the popularity and relevance of keywords and messaging that will shape your S.E.O stragegy.

3. Landing page optimization

A successful landing page strategy will be guided by both S.E.O. and Paid Search findings. As stated above, S.E.O can help improving customer experience, conversion and quality score. All of them can have a pretty large impact to your keyword bid strategy. Google recently said that doubling your quality score will double your rank under the paid search area, regardless of your bids.

4. Consistent brand experience

Having control  over S.E.O. and Paid Search will help create a consistent set of messages to the customer, improving brand recall and relevance.

5. Long tail strategy

While S.E.O. tends to focus on ‘owning’ the head (i.e. large traffic) keywords, Paid Search can be used to capture long tailed keywords that have less traffic but tend to more relevant and costs effective. It’s yet too early to say whether Google Instant could change the long tailed keyword hunt.

All-in-all we recommend that S.E.O and Paid Search run together and are performed by the same team, where it’s in-house or done externally.