It’s been known for a while there’s a big disparity between corporate marketing budgets allocated towards organic SEO and pay per click , according to Todd Malicoat. 

There seems to be a big disparity between corporate marketing budgets allocated towards organic SEO and pay per click (83% to PPC and 11% organic (SEMPO State of Search Marketing Survey 2005) yet research shows that most consumers trust organic rankings significantly more than PPC ads (Enquiro, iProspect, Nielsen/Netratings). What do you think SEO practitioners can do to change that and close the gap?

I interperted this to mean that SEO/SEM firms where following the money; corporations tended oursource PPC campaigns to Agencies and Boutique Internet Marketing firms.

Later on in the article:

SEO will definitely continue to evolve into more specific niches as the search engines evolve. Just looking back on the last year, it’s amazing to see how things have changed. SEO must be a part of the corporate marketing strategy, just like it was a must that they had a website several years ago. At some level, SEO’s are really just “meta-webmasters” that have a strong understanding of how each piece of the puzzle fits with the other pieces. I think you will continue to see LOTS of openings for “internet marketing project managers” at large corporations as they increasingly recognize the value of strong rankings. This is one of the reasons that I love the PPC disparity that you mentioned earlier. These folks are just getting their feet wet with internet marketing, understanding paid inclusion is a great prelude to a successful SEO campaign. As some of that budget (and other budgets) migrate towards optimization for organic search, it will be a great time to be an SEO (if it wasn’t already).

One of my clients really is into the rankings thing - and i’m into the conversion thing; i’ll accomodate clients that want me to tweak their pages - but i think SEO has moved into a different phase where conversions count much more than traffic.