Search engine marketing has no inherent obstacles. But anyone embarking on a search engine marketing campaign for the first time may encounter any of the following problem areas:

Hardware factors
Your target market may not yet be web literate.

You may want to use sound and vision. But your target audience may not have speakers.

A Rossiter & Co survey carried out Feb 2005 revealed that 50% of managers had speakers on their PCs. And this is growing all the time.

Organisational Factors
Search engine marketing services need support right from the very top. If your CEO doesn’t see its value, then you’ll have little chance.

IT departments, for good reasons, can put lots of bureaucratic barriers. For example they can restrict access to the server from outside experts, which makes search engine marketing all but impossible. Or they can present any potential user of the server with a barrage of paperwork and admin, which can make things slow to happen.

Who Wins?
It can be seen that the above obstacles are more likely to occur in larger organisations than SMEs.

For example: An organisation’s standard PC may not include speakers, so sound and vision communications are restricted.

For example: An IT dept that’s only just recovering from a “hack attack” will necessarily be restricting server access.

Typically the biggest users (and winners) have been the SMEs who can react more nimbly to market advantage.

Who Can Win?
If you’re keen on developing SEM for your organisation, you have to have the CEO and IT on your side.

With them as your allies, you can expect search engine marketing services to increase your turnover by 30% over 2 years.