Oct 15 2008
Recession and SEO
Early this year, Bruce Clay came out with its predictions on the state of online marketing for 2008.
He predicted slower growth in the industry because of the expected recession. Everyone knows that this will have serious impacts on both consumers and various businesses. This can affect the amount invested on online marketing efforts. However, the recession can work to the advantage of companies who were wise enough to set up online outlets early on to cater to international clients. It can encourage the increase of online consumers. Those who have managed to develop effective SEO strategies will have a competitive edge as comparative price shopping to save time and resources would become the popular consumer trend.
Pay-per-click campaign rates will remain the same but optimization will also see to its own set of developments to further polish the tool. Companies have already learned to bid only on terms that are effective in attracting conversions. “While many bread-and-butter keyword bid prices will hold steady or slowly increase, aggregate spend will drop. We will see the pruning of poorly performing keywords, diminishing aggregate spend for most companies.â€
Bruce Clay also predicted an increased demand for cost-effective and affordable search engine optimization services. Companies suffering from budget constraints caused by the recession will choose to seek professional assistance on this area but their budget wouldn’t be enough to pay for the rates set by the best in the industry. Recession may cause businesses to downsize so that people will start to pursue the opportunity to form their own home-based SEO firms. When this happens, the industry will find an increase of low-cost Internet Marketing services.
As the US dollar weakens, one can also expect that domestic price shopping traffic will consist of users from other parts of the globe taking advantage of the opportunity to purchase US-made products. This will increase online sales, but the improvement is still insufficient for overcoming the losses of local physical sales outlets due to the decline in foot traffic in stores. The big and established online shopping stores will enjoy a lot of gains this year.
Social networking will be the new trend in Internet marketing for 2008. The number of visitors to these sites will continuously increase. Blogs will dominate corporate branding techniques as well as online marketing strategies because of this.
On the whole, SEO will remain an valuable service as more and more companies will want to take their sales operations to the internet. The recession will get businesses to try out new and more cost-effective channels of promoting their products.
Take advantage of the trends by enlisting the help of Blackwood Productions.
