SEMPO and Econsultancy are asking those in the search and social communities to take the survey over here. The survey will be open until open through March 28, 2012. All SEMPO members get the final report included in their membership, if you are not a SEMPO member, the only other way to get the report for free is to participate in the survey yourself.

Here are some of the past results from 2011, 2010, 2009, 2007 and 2006.

To see all of SEMPO’s published research, see this page.

Again, please take the survey over here.

Related Stories:

• The State Of Search Engine Marketing 2010
• The State of Search Engine Marketing 2006
• The State Of Search Engine Marketing 2007
• SEMPO: Google Dominates But Social Now Widely Used For PPC
• Infographic: NYC & LA Tops For SEO Jobs & Salaries By Specialty
• View Of A Thriving Industry: The SEOmoz Industry Survey 2010
• SEMPO Releases Survey Data Revealing State Of SEM

There are currently 38 nominees for the 2012- 2014 Board, with a total of 13 seats to fill.

SEMPO members can vote electronically between February 14 through February 22, 2012. Votes must be submitted by Wednesday, February 22 at 5pm EDT.

The current board includes Chris Boggs, Massimo Burgio, Bruce Clay, Dave Fall, Rob Garner, Mike Grehan, Motoko Hunt, Kevin Lee, Kristjan Mar Hauksson, Dmitriy Minenko, Jeffrey Pruitt, Margaret Willette, Michael Y. Xu. It seems over half of the existing board is not up for nomination this year.

For more details on the election process, download this PDF.

Related Stories:

• SEMPO To Feds: Hands Off Google
• SEMPO: Google Dominates But Social Now Widely Used For PPC
• SEMPO LA Event Highlights Rapidly Emerging Opportunities In Mobile
• SEMPO Board Elects Officers
• SEMPO Seeks Help Classifying Search Marketers For US Government
• SEMPO Finds Most SEMs Willing To Pay More For Enhanced Targeting, Interest In Mobile Search And Video
• SEMPO Invites Search Marketers To Take Its Annual Industry Survey
• SEMPO Institute Adds Summer Sessions
• SEMPO Releases Second Annual In-House Salary Survey Results

Mobile Commerce Is Maturing

Bon Mercado, a mobile product specialist at Google, said that the wide adoption of smart phones in the US (up to 50% have them in 2011) is paving the way for increased search queries, commercial transactions, and unique ad formats. Consumers are now much more comfortable conducting transactions via their device. Bon cited a Priceline statistic that 82% of mobile transactions came on the first visit to the site vs. only 45% on the desktop.

To further drive the point home, he quoted an incredible stat from EBay Motors that 1 in 3 Ferraris purchased on their site came via a mobile device. As consumers continue to buy via their devices, it paves the way for advertising dollars to flow to mobile and creates a more direct connection between online behavior and offline purchasing.

Local Advertising Is Scalable

One area that is starting to see mobile ad growth take off is in the local space. Corey McMahon from AT&T Interactive said that the company’s 1mm local advertisers are starting to take notice of mobile as a scalable and effective channel. He said that while your local pizza parlor may look out of place advertising on a traditional website, within a mobile experience it makes perfect sense, due to the device’s knowledge of your location.

As such, mobile ad networks are starting to be able to monetize their inventory much better through local advertisers than more price sensitive lead gen (or ringtone) folks.

Need For Mobile SEO Growing

As mobile adoption explodes, so will the sheer size and complexity of the mobile web. To that end, two of the panelists (Gideon Rubin from Lenco Mobile and John Cole from AT&T Interactive) cited a growing need for mobile SEO. Cole said that making mobile sites crawlable is essential and developers need to make sure they aren’t just applying desktop techniques, such as using session IDs, to their mobile websites.

Rubin, whose company enables live broadcasts to be consumed on mobile devices, said that it is particularly difficult to do SEO for mobile apps, since these are distributed through a small number of closed marketplaces. He believes that app developers have to lean on social techniques to create buzz about their products and drive distribution, but at the end of the day, a killer product will be the biggest driver of interest and adoption.

New Mobile Formats & Channels Emerging

Finally, Stephanie Schipper, technology and digital strategist at TakePart/Participant Media, wowed the audience with some very impressive statistics around her organization’s ability to drive awareness for a cause and get people to take action. She said that a text campaign around her studio’s Waiting For Superman drove a 50% response rate, since the first thing that people typically do when a movie ends is turn on their cell phones.

Schipper’s example highlights one of the most exciting things about the recent boom in mobile – the most effective ad formats can and should be very different than what we’ve seen to date.

This is a search marketer’s dream, as there is a huge palette of formats and channels to test, as well as a direct and measurable link between a consumer engaging with an ad and taking action in a storefront. It will not be surprising to see the search stars of today become the mobile stars of tomorrow…just look at Sergey Brin.

Want to participate? Complete the brief survey before the November 1 deadline. You do not need to be a SEMPO member to participate.

In a recent SEMPO newsletter, the organization explained what’s going on:

You can be part of an important and exciting task force for SEMPO, to help the US Government understand and document the job classification that includes search marketing expertise. Among its many uses, it will allow those in the Search Industry to bid more easily on government contracts.

SEMPO has been asked to facilitate participation by at least 500 industry experts to fill out a questionnaire on a new O*Net-SOC Code that will be used by the government to classify professionals in the Search Industry.

SEMPO goes on to explain that they’re looking only for U.S.-based companies and individuals, and preferably those with five or more years of search marketing experience.

If you’d like to volunteer to help with the Labor Department’s questionnaire, SEMPO asks you to respond “Yes” and fill out this online form:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/Industry-SOC-Code

The DOL will pay $40 to those it selects to complete its questionnaire.

• Chairman: Jeffrey Pruitt, CEO of Tallwave (re-elected chairman)
• President: Chris Boggs, Director, Search Engine Optimization, ROSETTA
• Vice president: Dave Fall, SVP Product and Operations, Clickable, Inc.
• Treasurer: Margaret Willette, Search Marketing Manager, Intuit
• Secretary: Motoko Hunt, President, Japanese Search Strategist, AJPR

Founded in 2002, SEMPO now has more than 800 members in 40 countries. The officers were drawn from the new board of directors elected earlier this year, as covered more in SEMPO Elects 2010 Board Members.

The report, based on a global online survey of nearly 1,500 client-side marketers and agency respondents, also found that measuring the return on investment (ROI) is the biggest challenge facing marketers this year in all three key search tactics covered in the survey—search engine optimization, paid search and social media marketing.

Another unsurprising finding: Google dominates. 97% of companies responding to the survey said they advertise on Google, with 71% paying to advertise on the Google search network, and 56% distributing ads via the Google content network. By contrast, 50% use Yahoo! Search, and 44% use Bing, compared to 54% who said they used Microsoft Live (MSN) search in 2009.

Many search marketers have experienced keyword inflation on Google. 56% of advertisers and 62% of agencies said that Google keywords have become more expensive over the last year, but these increases appear to be mostly limited to Google, with only 32% reporting higher costs on Yahoo and 29% on Bing.

Another key trend relates to the impact of personalized search results, with 31% reporting that personalization is having a “highly significant” impact on search marketing efforts, with a further 44% calling it a “significant” trend.

Let’s get social

Despite all the attention social media is getting, social media marketing budgets are still virtually insignificant compared to those for search engine optimization and paid search. 73% of companies had a budget of less than $25,000 for social media marketing in 2009, including 23% who said their budget for Facebook, Twitter and other social media darlings was zero.

But budgets are expanding to match the interest in social media. 59% said budgets for social media marketing will increase this year, with 37% saying budgets for social media marketing will be the same. Just 4% said they will reduce their social media spend in 2010.

Despite the apparent lack of spending on social media, three quarters of companies said they are using Facebook (74%) and Twitter (73%) to promote their brands or companies.

Interestingly, agencies are significantly more likely to say that the rise of social media has had a major impact on their search engine marketing (74%) compared with just half of company respondents (52%).

Winners and losers

The number of companies who engage in search engine optimization (90%) has remained steady since 2007, while the proportion of companies carrying out paid search marketing (now 81%) has increased from 78% in 2009 and 70% in 2008.

The trend toward in-house search marketing seemed to pick up slightly during the past year, with agencies doing SEO for clients declining to 88% compared to 89% in 2009. With paid search, the percentage decreased more dramatically, dropping a full ten percentage points from 86% to 76%.

And despite the growing complexity of managing sophisticated campaigns, the majority of companies (53%) carrying out search engine marketing are not using a third party bid management technology for paid search marketing, relying instead on search engine tools and Excel, down slightly from 57% last year.

On average, companies expect to spend 43% more on SEO and 37% more on paid search in 2010 than they did in 2009. Where is the budget coming from? About 49% are reallocating budgets to search engine marketing, moving spend from print advertising. 36% are shifting money from direct mail, and almost a quarter are moving budgets from conferences and exhibitions and web display advertising.

SEMPO has done a remarkably good job at forecasting industry growth since it first started conducting these annual surveys, even in the face of recent economic disruption. For example, looking back at the The State of Search Engine Marketing 2006 report, SEMPO estimated that spend would grow to $18.6 billion by 2011, in trend with this year’s current estimate.

The executive summary of the State of Search Engine Marketing Report 2010 can be downloaded here.

The study will project planned spending across the industry for search, advertising, and social media campaigns in 2010. Its goal is “to assess the economy’s effect on year-to-year online marketing spending and investigate new trends.”

The survey is open until February 22nd. All participants will get a free copy of the final report (a $249 value) when it’s released in March.

You can access the survey at http://bit.ly/SEMPO-search. SEMPO says it should take about 10 minutes to complete.

SEMPO is hosting a webinar this week to explain more about the requirements and responsibilities of being a board member, as well as the nomination and election process for its board. The webinar is scheduled for Thursday, January 14, at 3:00 pm ET. You can learn more and register here for the webinar.

SEMPO board members serve two year terms.

The new courses were added to the Effective Search Marketing online classes and are named “Linking and Brand Management” and “Social Media.” They cost $299 each and you can enroll for them over here.

Here are the course descriptions:

Effective Search Marketing: Linking and Brand Management:
The course will cover how to obtain high quality links from a variety of sources, including link recovery, directories, social media and expert articles. It will explain how to develop compelling content and how to effectively promote the content to traditional and online media in order to attract links, and include discussion on the use of humour, interactive games, podcasting and video as tools for link attracting. Students will also learn what to consider before purchasing text links and paid methods such as brokers, ad space, sponsorships, newsletters and reviews.

Course attendees will learn the value of brand reputation monitoring and management, brand management methods and procedures, competitor tracking, and how best to respond to feedback in various online channels.

Effective Search Marketing: Social Media:
This course will examine the gamut of social media and employ case studies to illustrate the right and wrong way of using social media to fulfill marketing objectives. Since each social media channel has its own rules of engagement, the course will help marketers learn what you need to consider with each channel in order to get the buzz out for your company or client.

Developing an effective social media strategy is a key part of the course which will cover digital media assets, defining and engaging your target market, and how social media integrates with search engine optimization (SEO) and search advertising to social media.

Students will also examine Twitter in depth, as a social media archetype. They will examine the opportunities, risks and obligations of Twitter, and how this information can be applied to all social media marketing.

Lastly, students will learn how to use social media for reputation management and for quickly correcting public relations problems. Case studies will be used to demonstrate right and wrong methods.