There have always been the search agencies that say they partner with search engines. Generally this is stated to give them an advantage in a bid process however, more often than not, this is a fabrication of the truth.

The following article details how, as the online marketing industry grows, the search engines do actually need the agencies to maintain real relevancy to its search results.

Speaking in New York earlier this month Tim Cadogan, the British Vice-President of Yahoo Search, spoke many times on the importance of search marketing agencies in the future growth of the industry.

A significant comment? Very. To date, the relationship between search marketers and the search engines has not been an easy one. Search marketers want to discover how the search engines are selecting sites – search engines have felt their carefully crafted search engine results pages have been manipulated, making their sorting mathematics virtually pointless.

Equally, there have been numerous fallings-out between search engines and search marketing agencies. Direct sales people from the search engines have created friction with agencies, contracts between search engines and advertisers have been written to make life difficult for agencies.

But, as search moves towards handling larger sums of money and to being a more advertising driven industry, the agency channel has continued to develop and to offer relatively advanced support for clients even when the search engines have not been co-operating.

Take ranking report checks for instance. All search engines have described these as ‘against their guidelines’ and as ‘automated queries’ something that could have your agency punished in some way. Search engines were also concerned that advertisers might work harder to manipulate results if they were seeing rank positions more frequently.

So Cadogan’s remarks that, “it’s becoming a complex industry and clients are simply not going to have the resources to handle it,” is a startling statement – albeit true.

Equally stunning is the fact that Google has now launched a tool which can be used to check rankings! In typical style, of course, you can’t check or compare your rank positions with other search engines – so it has a relatively limited use for most advertisers – but it is a change of heart and is to be welcomed.

Things are moving in the right direction and fast. Both MSN and Yahoo have significant knowledge about their user base thanks to registrations for email services such as hotmail. MSN’s new AdCenter – which is already at version 3 following its own refresh – is focusing on targeting demographics. Advertisers can choose to bid more to target women or men – different times of day and many other factors.

There are few now who aren’t aware of the impact of the search engines and search marketing agencies. The line up of search engines looks like media or TV organisations lining up to win the best share of the audience they can to generate value for advertisers and thereby attract greater revenues.

The tidying up of the search brands is good for the industry and less confusing for companies. It will win more clients over to the concept which will be good for both consumers and advertisers.

Yahoo’s stance on the industry is refreshing. MSN has long had a partnership approach with its software distributors. Now all we need is for Google to adopt a proper channel strategy where they speak to the industry and tell their partners of forthcoming changes BEFORE they hit the deck.

Search is without doubt an exciting market to be in. It’s not a mature industry by any means but it’s growing up fast. With three advertising systems not even rolled out – there’s still a long way to go.

The big engines are important players and partners and search is much more complex than it appears on the surface. At the SMA we’re committed to enhancing training accreditation in the industry and we'd like to see expert search professionals managing campaigns like pay-per-click. We'll be working with search marketing agencies and the engines to drive the industry forwards.

Clients need objective agency support. Search engines are struggling to recruit enough people to go sell their systems, and agencies need a professional way of working with the search engines. Then the whole system will have a better chance of taking its full place at the marketing budget table.

To the huge numbers of potential clients watching to see what happens next, take my advice and learn how it works now – because that will give you the advantage of experience later when it will make a massive difference to you and your business.