Internet marketing publisher E-consultancy has released a survey-based report called ‘Managing an E-commerce Team’ (http://www.e-consultancy.com/publications/managing-ecommerce-team/), it found that SEM/SEO is the number one outsourced e-activity, with paid-search second top. Yet 60% manage search in-house, while almost a third totally ignore PPC.

All suggests a lot more room for growth, particularly in the search agency sector.

The report found that 27.5% of companies outsource their organic search optimisation requirements to specialist search agencies, digital agencies or freelancers.

Around 6 out of 10 companies manage organic search in-house, typically via a central e-commerce or digital marketing team. Otherwise, search tends to be offloaded to brand or product marketing teams; 10% of respondents said this was the case.

Amazingly, almost 5% of respondents admitted to being completely inactive in the area of organic search optimisation. This rises six-fold for paid-search, with almost 30% of companies ignoring networks like Google Adwords and Overture, which provide a fast-track route to the top of the search engines on a pay-per-click basis.

Paid-search is the second-most heavily outsourced e-marketing activity. One in five companies uses a third party agency to manage bids and keywords on PPC networks. Around half manage paid-search in-house.

Most outsourced e-marketing activities

• SEO (27.5%)
• PPC (20%)
• Affiliate marketing (15%)
• Retention-based email marketing (14%)
• Online PR (13%)

This would indicate that the search engines could be doing much more to work with agencies currently managing SEO, to help them develop the paid channel for their clients, and to raise the profile of the paid search in general.