From the earliest time of the industry, search marketers have rallied behind the idea that companies needed to hire them in order to increase a web site's rankings in the search engines. The idea was that higher rankings equaled more traffic and more traffic equaled more sales. Online businesses large and small, disappointed to discover that traffic wasn't exactly lining up at the doors of their newly opened web sites, slowly began to see value in the "voodoo" that search marketers promised to work on their sites. As such, an industry was born.
The problem was that as more businesses became skilled about the need for search engine marketing, the idea that search engine marketing was all about rankings sustained to spread. This set the entire industry up for a level of expectation that simply cannot be sustained. While top five or even top ten rankings could be achieved by skilled SEMs for almost any keyword phrase, the day is coming when the industry will grow to levels that make phrases so competitive that even the most skilled search marketers will have difficulty attaining top rankings.

Imagine, for a moment, that other marketing industries had set themselves up with similar expectations. That email marketers were measured unsuccessful if you didn't make the top ten list in terms of visitors to your site, that public relations professionals were a failure if you weren't one of the top ten stories of the year, that television commercials were a failure unless they resulted in more store visits than all but ten other companies in their industry. Starting to sound a little silly?

Of course it does! Marketing is about finding new and innovative ways to present a product so that it drives purchases. Commercial marketers work to capture an audience’s attention in a way that keeps a company top of mind when the need arises for their product. Direct mail advertisers seek to capture a potential customer's interest with a compelling enough offer to create a sale or at least an inquiry. This is where the search marketing industry finds itself facing a challenge. They need to educate businesses to help them toss out the old "top ten rankings" philosophy in exchange for the more realistic and sustainable "positive return on investment" philosophy. Otherwise, the entire industry runs the risk of imploding sometime in the next several years. The industry did shoot itself in the collective foot by setting up expectations based on rankings, but a positive ROI can act as a powerful remedy to help get things moving again.

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