Ever since the industry began there were defined lines between the two distinct avenues of SEM, one was search engine optimisation also known as SEO and the other was paid search or PPC as the industry knows it. The two specialist services were very different and agencies tended to concentrate on one or the other, over time some agencies became very big off the back of PPC services and captured the lion's share of the market.
In reverse, those that specialised in SEO also captured their main market and over time there was some cross-pollination of the two services with a side order of other online marketing practices also developing. It was understood that the difficult side of the industry was SEO, for the main part PPC is a management process, of course the agencies fluff this up quite a bit with advertising speak to make it seem more complex.
The management of PPC is a very professional process though and not to be taken lightly, bid management software helps this process but it will never compare in expertise to the process of SEO.
Now all of a sudden the industry is being turned on its head, the process of PPC has been changed by Google; it has brought in some of the factors that have to be addressed in the same way as the natural search process.
In a nutshell Adwords now factors in relevancy in such a way that it now needs the expertise from SEO to be applied to enable a truly successful PPC campaign. This is a factor that has got many established paid search agencies perplexed, they do not understand how to create and order a landing page to get maximum relevancy for Google's landing page algorithm.
Of course the PPC agencies are in denial, they will not accept this change and they have struggled to deliver the optimum relevancy trail from Ad copy to landing page. This means for the first time SEO agencies now have the edge with the paid search process as well as the natural search process.
This competitive edge will not be seen immediately as established paid search agencies are able to use fluffy advertising language to screen the change. What will happen though is in large companies who deploy PPC through a procurement process a discernable difference will be noticed between agencies who are not only using a different process but also performing to a different level.
This will be the catalyst for a slow migration of PPC business from established management agencies to true SEO agencies; the landscape will change until the large agencies get sensible and consolidate the industry by purchasing quality natural search companies who have the expertise that is lacking.
This expertise in many cases is the result of 10 years at the sharp end of SEO and cannot be fast tracked by some crash course, only when the industry consolidates will we finally see a true market leader for SEM as a complete service.
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