Apparently Fortune 500 companies have money to burn on search marketing.

According to a new study from Conductor, only 25% of the Fortune 500’s combined targeted paid keywords–97,555 keywords, totaling a daily spend of $3.4M–ranked in the top 50 natural search results.

Think about that. These companies are collective spending $1.2 billion a year on paid search placement, yet 75% of these important keywords are not ranking organically inside the top 50 search results!

Even more staggering, only 2% of Fortune 500 domains analyzed had any significant number of search terms in the top results–which we presume means first page visibility.

When you break it down by company, only 0.6%, are achieving top 50 keyword placement. Which means that less than 1% of companies control the lion share of the  25% of keywords ranking inside the top 50! Talk about outliers!

Of course, this is one study, one snapshot of data, but it goes to show that in 2010, Fortune 500 companies still don’t have a handle on their SEO campaigns. They’d rather pay for their ignorance in search ads instead.

You can grab a copy of the report here.

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