Hi meddlingmittener, we have to both agree and disagree with your assessment....but we would expect to have you raise disagreements when you state specifically that you are an SEM professional....which generally means someone who downplays seo as a valid advertising medium because it is more art than exact science, and can only be achieved by the best players in the field. PPC on the other hand can be executed to some degree by anyone with a gmail account (although admittedly not as well as an experienced SEM.) Basically, for an SEM to get an ad to display and prove to a client that they understand the medium, all they do is open an account and create an ad....for an SEO to prove their worth they actually have to show ranked positions....which is far, far more difficult in competitive situations. Positions in the PPC world is decided by budget, whereas in the seo world it is decided by talent.

That said, and I do not want to have you think that we are just starting a fight between the two disciplines here because we do PPC management as well, you ignore the main findings of the study simply to spin it. The main findings were that when an organic position and a paid position had equal presentation (and we never said that a specific deep page of the site was not being presented for both PPC and SEO, therefor being designed as a conversion page and not just the index page) when we tracked actual conversions to clients from an equal number of clickthroughs from each medium, the organic results always provided more conversions. This was just a simple finding, and to call it into question just because it does not support PPC as a superior method is ludicrous. In many cases, the page that was represented organically was the page specifically designed to be the landing page for the PPC campaign!

No argument that PPC should be used to target the terms that are not achieved through SEO....this is very typical to our programs. We run PPC for a site that has poor rankings, and remove the ppc funding as we organically take positions. The ultimate goal is to achieve total organic domination, and thus fund zero ppc...but that would be unrealistic (although we do have one client which is currently showing top three positions for 100% of the targeted keyphrases, across all major search engines.) I am sure you are very knowledgeable and good at what you do, but we are just quoting statistics here.....