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I am all for putting your best foot forward, after all that is what SEO is all about but it seems Google has used some very creative accounting in making claims about how much it contributes to the US economy.

They (Google) claim that in the US they “generated $54 billion of economic value in 2009.” How did they arrive at that figure?

How, then, do we then correctly calculate Google’s contribution to the economy?

The same way we determine the economic impact of other companies: the value of the goods and services produced, minus the value of all of resources consumed. Google generated revenue of $23.65 Billion in 2009 and by their own reckoning, their expenditures were about $17.13 Billion, which means that Google’s worldwide value addition was about $6.5 Billion. Google does just under half of its business in the US, so their US economic impact in the US was about $3.2 Billion, far less than the $54 Billion they claim.

Seth Godin had a really nice post about hourly work vs. linchpin work (flat fee) and I found it very applicable to SEO.  I forever see the same questions floating around the SEO message boards, “how much should I charge” – usually it comes from someone who is just starting out but sometimes the replies are quite interesting.  I  love the example Seth gives:

I had a college professor who did engineering consulting. A brand new office tower in Boston had a serious problem–there was a brown stain coming through the drywall, (all of the drywall) no matter how much stain killer they used. In a forty story building, if you have to rip out all the drywall, this is a multi-million dollar disaster. They had exhausted all possibilities and were a day away from tearing out everything and taking a loss. They hired Henry in a last-ditch effort to solve the problem. He looked at the walls and said, “I think I can work out a solution, but it will cost you $45,000 if I succeed.” They instantly signed on, because if he succeeded, the project would be saved.

Henry asked for a pencil and paper and wrote the name of a common hardware store chemical and handed it to them. “Here, this will work.” And then he billed them $45,000. That’s quite an hourly wage. It’s also quite a bargain.

In my opinion this is the same valuation a good SEO might garner.  Read the entire post here.

Chitika advertising network published some analysis it did of click through percentages based on 8,253,240 impressions.

“In order to find out the value of SEO, we looked at a sample of traffic coming into our advertising network from Google and broke it down by Google results placement.

The top spot drove 34.35% of all traffic in the sample, almost as much as the numbers 2 through 4 slots combined, and more than the numbers 5 through 20 (the end of page 2) put together.”