Search Engine Marketing Must Die!

What's up with the title? It may seem a strange start to my blog, especially since I founded ClickShift (email me if you want a password) and we buy a lot of keywords for our clients. But I believe it - search engine marketing must die.

Why? To most people in the online world, search engine marketing means strategically buying keywords, targeting those words to the right sites and geographies, and varying their bids to get the best possible return on their investment. But isn't that just marketing? Shouldn't we apply the same analytical discipline to all of our marketing efforts? Why should search engine marketing be any different than other marketing?

Search shouldn't be different. True, it's a little easier to get started with search than it is with banners, but online marketers need to evaluate every channel with the same rigor they use (or should be using) for search. This evaluation then needs to inform their ad purchases and placement so that their budgets flow automatically to the ads that perform. As more and more people flock to search ads, this discipline is only going to become more important. FTD and Blue Nile are already having problems getting search to perform like it used to. There's already too much demand for certain keywords. With the help of a search engine marketer, you can find additional keywords where demand is still low enough to pay off. But even that's a short term game.

The only way to win in the long term is to have analytically disciplined online marketing efforts - across all channels, not just search. Only with rigorous performance analysis and constant feedback can you be certain that your online marketing dollars will always get spent where they return the highest value. Sometimes that highest value comes from search, but not always. As more people pile into search, you'll see the relative ROI of other channels improve - but only if you're watching!

Search engine marketing must die. The discipline behind it must be applied more broadly.

Related Tags: search engine marketing, sem, online marketing