It seems that the importance of coordinating PPC and SEO campaigns is enough to bring two companies together. Instead of pre-qualifingy clickers, the search engine marketing firm Ineedhits.com has teamed up with SitePal.com to send traffic to landing pages that actually pitches the clicker on becoming a conversion. As the press release explains:

Perth, WA (PRWEB) October 6, 2007 -- ineedhits (www.ineedhits.com), an industry leader in affordable search engine marketing solutions, and Sitepal (www.sitepal.com), the developer of speaking avatar technology, today announced a joint marketing program that will offer small businesses a more comprehensive suite of online marketing solutions.

The program significantly expands the offering and reach of the services through a new reseller arrangement. Through the ineedhits SEO Wizard Reseller Solution, SitePal will provide their customers access to an extensive range of leading search engine submission, optimization and paid search advertising services (PPC) via a selection of free SEO tools.

Sitepal's range of speaking avatars and virtual salespeople will become the newest offering in ineedhits' conversion product department. By promoting the Sitepal tools to their over 500,000 small business customer base, ineedhits will be offering website owners a complete end to end online marketing solution; delivering website traffic from the search engines and helping them to convert the traffic into paying customers or leads with SitePal technology.

Indeed, playing PPC/SEO keyword games often isn't enough to guarantee that clicks convert. But actually pitching the user to close the deal is, as far as I know, completely unprecedented.

Mind you, if traffic is, indeed, targeted (as SEM firms as supposed to do), it might be more of a case of preaching to the choir than converting the heathans. In fact, one case study by SitePal saw a client increase traffic by 50% and conversions by 40%. Mind you, it makes no mention of what traffic was like before and after.

At the end of the day, we're just going to have to wait and see if this is a model that becomes worth imitating. Given how 77.5% and 62.2% found online video advertising intrusive and disruptive respectively, I'm rather skeptical that talking avatars is a sustainable model. If I'm right, the real question will be which firm will benefit from it in the long run. Since I feel that SitePal.com's product is the less sustainable of the two, it is probably them who stand to gain the most.