The study--which the New York-based Conductor will use as a metric for other reports to come--measures the maturity of natural search efforts in comparison with the pay-per-click (PPC) spending. The study also examines whether investments for paid search terms made by Fortune 500 companies are paying off. The company published a similar study in November 2008, but this time it looked at the top 200 keywords, rather than the top 10. It also considered branded keywords.

"It remains alarming that although we included branded keywords in the study for the Fortune 500, more than the lion's share are not showing up anywhere in search results for their most important keywords, including their own names," said Seth Besmertnik, Conductor CEO.

In search results, natural listings comprise the majority of clicks, with some studies showing more than 75% of all activity occurring in the natural space. While companies cannot directly purchase these natural search keywords, they do have the ability to control the variables that lead to improved ranking through search engine optimization (SEO). The study indicates that several companies have shown strong growth in aligning their natural search visibility with their paid spends, but as a group, the Fortune 500 continues to remain largely invisible in natural search results.

Conductor's study suggests that Fortune 500 companies are gaining visibility through natural search results, but even high performers struggle with inconsistent execution across brands. Only 1.41% of the domains surveyed show significant number of their terms in the top results. All of these positive domain scores were offset by other owned domains with significant visibility issues.

Still, 10.14% of Fortune 500 companies studied showed mid-to-strong presence for their most advertised keywords, and 41.69% of Fortune 500 companies have low to mid presence. Visibility decreased as search queries grew in length.

Companies in the food services business and retail only did "marginally better," said Seth Dotterer, director of marketing at Conductor. "Part of the reason is they have large marketing campaigns and it makes it difficult for them to manage the SEO efforts," Dotterer said. "We see them starting to get better and poke into the top 100, but not necessarily where consumers see them."

Fortune 500 companies did worse as keyword searches became more complex and longer, Dotterer said. They were less likely to be found in the search results. "Once you got around five keywords, they dropped nearly 6% from the main one, which is significant," he said.

Some of the tactics to improve natural search efforts include improving the title tags on the Web site and creating content on new keywords, Dotterer said.

Unlike PPC campaigns, where you can add a dollar to the campaign during the morning and see results from the investment in the afternoon, natural search campaigns require companies to optimize text on pages and headings in title bars. SEO takes much more work.

Pinpointing industry leaders was fairly easy, according to the report, because several companies performed much better than others. Conductor did, however, remove several with limited exposure to paid search from consideration. The "market" was defined by the parent company's North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) codes used by the government to classify companies.

For instance, Cisco is classified as a "manufacturing" company due to its NAICS code. Companies that did well in their category include MGM Mirage (accommodations & food services); Whirlpool (manufacturing); Viacom (information); Amazon (retail trade) and IBM (professional, scientific & technical services).

This news story is important. I recommend that everyone read it.