What's the right search strategy for your niche? That's the question we're looking at in this week's Whiteboard Friday.  Determining which tactics are going to be most effective for your particular situation is critical for search marketers. PPC, SEO, Social, Viral? Sure they all have their advantages, but depending on the marketplace you're in, some strategies may be much more viable - in both cost and effectiveness - than others.

Not surprisingly, the ease with which you can see good results with a given strategy is inversely proportional to the amount of money and attention being allotted to it. As you'll see in the video, Rand estimates that PPC becomes an extremely difficult tactic to implement effectively in even modestly competitive markets, while Social Media can reap great rewards with little difficulty in highly-competitive sectors.  Take a look at this data from the recent Forrester US Interactive Marketing Forecast:

As you can see, PPC controls the lion's share of search dollars, followed in distant second by SEO, with Social bringing up the rear (it's that itty-bitty one down there in green).  The degree to which you can be effective in these areas depends a good deal on how big of a fish you can be in the portion of that pond dedicated to your corner of the web. 

Does this mean you should ignore any particular tactic? No, it just means you may have to carefully weigh your options, goals, and resources for each campaign to plan your strategy properly. 

All areas of online marketing are growing like crazy: Marketing dollars spent on SEO and PPC are projected to double in the next five years (Social will more than quadruple) and make up an ever-larger chunk of business' overall marketing spend.  That's great news for our industry as a whole, but it also means increased competition. Get in the habit of considering your strategy in terms of market segment competition now, and you'll be better able to handle (or sidestep) competitive trends in the years to come.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Market Forces & SEO from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

If you'd like more info on Forrester research, you may want to check out Shar VanBoskirk's Blog, she's their online/search guru and writes some great stuff.


UPDATE: I changed the graphic depicting the breakdown of search marketing spend because Seth Godin was kind enough to email me and suggest a more appropriate (and interesting) way to present the information (Thanks, Seth!). He just wrote a great post on how to make graphs that work, I highly recommend you check it out.