Have to agree on all of your points except I’m wondering whether they don’t get it. I find that hard to believe, my opinion is that these big companies are 1. very big and it will take quite some time to change the whole website for obvious reasons (one of your arguments too), but als that 2. these big companies are much more focussing on the image and informational aspect for their websites at the moment, rather than reeling in visitors through great SEO.

Wonder how many extra sales (in % )Nike would be making if they ranked for no.1 for “running shoes”.
Still great room for improvement though for these guys to combine these factors.

@Joe: It would be very interesting to see what would happen when small businesses suddenly got large company budgets, I’m pretty sure they could achieve more with it.

About the content part, well, that’s your area, and I can only agree with you there.

@David: A lot of these companies already almost get it. They’re in the process of convincing decision makers that SEM is very important and are trying to make some changes internally. Because of the bureaucracy of these companies, changes like this can take forever.

Also, the technology adoption life cycle comes into play here. Once the visionaries have been convinced, the rest usually follows.

Overall nice thinking but wrong conclusion IMHO. What makes you think they will finally “get it” in the next five years when only 8% “get it” after 10 years? I don’t get it.

I would agree that large companies have plenty of content, but it seems many lack context for where that content can be most helpful to customers and prospects. I also see a lot of big content ideas, without the day-to-day content blocking and tackling that needs to happen to really sustain ongoing conversations.

Great post.