• The average marketer spent 12% of his or her search budget on search engine optimization (SEO) last year. That's the art of tweaking your company's Web site so search engine spiders are more likely to notice it, and give you great organic rankings. (Organic are the results you don't pay anything for.)
• On the other hand, the average marketer spent 88% of his or her search marketing budget on paid search ads.

It's a massive discrepancy. But is it justified? Nope, according to Anne Holland, President of Marketing Sherpa in a new article entitled Your Search Marketing Budget is Probably Out of Whack.

Rather than buying paid ads on search engine results pages, marketers instead shoudl work on boosting their "organic" listing.  Not only are these links free, they're more effective.