As the public’s use of Search Engines have increased, so have the need for small businesses to leverage SEO (Search Engine Optimization) consultants and software tools in order for their websites to rank in search results.

The challenge for the SEO industry is that the market is fragmented into consultants and tools, of which are further divided into paid tools, consultant’s home-grown solutions, and free tools available on the Internet (usually supported by advertising). Because search engine optimization is an ever changing science, a wide universe of SEO tools exist to help businesses achieve better search engine rankings – from keyword density analyzers to web analytics to lead management software – but a singular integrated solution does not exist at the application level.

Yet.

While consultants refer to SEO as, “organic rankings,” and paid search as, “PPC,” (pay-per-click) the public perception of “SEO,” is quite different, and encompasses not only both paid and organic search, but lead generation, online branding, web analytics, email marketing, and lead management CRM. In other words, eMarketing in general in seen as “SEO,” as far as Small Business is concerned.

As such, today’s world of SEO tools are highly function specific, and are not comprehensive in addressing the whole needs of small businesses or individual SEO consultants. Today’s small business trying to get a successful eMarketing campaign off the ground must hire a web developer, subscribe to a hosted CRM service at a monthly fee per user, install and pay for a web analytics solution to gather intelligence about their website, subscribe to or scour the net to piece together a variety of SEO tools, and subscribe to a paid CANSPAM compliant email marketing application. And then they need to administer and manage it all.

So while consultants are entrenched in the world of eMarketing at the technical and strategic levels in helping the Fortune 5 Million understand the mechanics and importance of search engine advertising, the bulk of small businesses do not necessarily want SEO – they want increased sales on the Internet through effective eMarketing.

In other words, they don’t want to know how the various meat ingredients are processed in making pepperoni sausages, they just want pepperoni on their pizzas without having to think about it.

Therefore, something the public popularly refers to as “SEO,” is actually eMarketing that consists of 5 components of near equal importance:

1) Organic Search

2) Paid Search, Bid & Keyword Management

3) Lead Management CRM (sometimes called Salesforce Automation)

4) Web Analytics

5) CANSPAM Compliant Email Marketing

While LeadMarket.com is the world’s first truly integrated eMarketing software application (encompassing organic SEO tools with web analytics, lead management CRM, email marketing functions, and pay-per-click management utilities) we also understand that our growing success and popularity must be tied into the SEO consultant and independent software developer community.

That’s why we created the Open SEO Project based on the LeadMarket API, so that:

• SEO consultants could leverage the LeadMarket application at a 75% discount and be able to private label the solution, thus focusing on serving clients as opposed to maintaining a variety of disparate eMarketing and Client Reporting applications.
• Allow independent software developers to gain access to LeadMarket’s base of subscribers by allowing them to tie in their new SEO and eMarketing applications onto the LeadMarket application platform.

Various estimates approximate the SEO consulting and tools industry to account for 11% of the overall $4B search industry in 2005, a percentage consistent with 2004. We believe that, over the next 3 years, there is room for the SEO consulting and applications market to increase to 15% to 20% of the overall search industry by dollars, meaning that it will grow not only as the search industry grows, but at a faster overall rate within the search industry itself as more effective and user friendly tools are adopted by the Fortune 5 Million.

And we believe a vast majority of them will do it on LeadMarket.com.