The news of the past few months has been dominated by one thing only – the global economic slowdown and recession. More and more, we are seeing evidence that business is slowing down, companies are spending less and money is generally becoming tighter. Just this morning, The Ernst and Young Item Club, economic forecasters, are quoted as suggesting the UK economy will shrink by 1% in 2009 before recovering in 2010 to begin growing again.

How does the recession effect internet marketing and search engine optimisation?

We have a real range of clients here at Metafocus, from the small independant trader relying on ecommerce conversions to larger companies looking to raise profile and online enquiries alongside other advertising media, but, in all instances we are seeing particular trends as they become more focussed on expenditure and activities:

1. SEO Expenditure Goes Up!
This sounds a little unusual but we’ve actually seen a change is spend for some of our clients with a shift towards online marketing as opposed to more traditional media such as magazine advertising. One of our clients, a well known local hotel group commented that 3 months of SEo was the same price as one magazine ad.

SEO and online marketing is very cheap and above all, monitorable. We often recommend PPC to our customers as this is completely trackable and scalableand really does let you know what is working and what is not.

2. Targets Become More Focussed.
For many people, SEO is still seen as a “dark art” with the exact techniques and approaches hidden from view. Although we’re much more open than that, many of our clients are happy to step back and let us do our thing with little or no interference. However, as belts get tightened we’re noticing that the demands placed on us are becoming more focussed and need to be measured more accurately. And to be honest, this works for us too!

Knowing exactly how many orders we need to get through the door, which products or services to target and which target markets are the most profitable can only make our job easier. Which leads onto..

3. Conversion is a 2-Way Street
As much as some of our clients take a back seat when it comes to internet marketing activity, often we are out of the loop when it comes to how much business is actually being done. Ecommerce is easy to measure, after all, it’s all about how many sales you make and how much money you bring in but what about a B2B company who measures success by the number of enquiries they have coming in – how is this measured?

We’ve seen a few examples now of clients building internal systems to measure enquiry sources and which of these convert into customers to help them work out what is working and what is not. Are they getting enquires through web searchers or referrals or PPC? Is this the right sort of business for them? Again, all this helps to inform what we do and make our job more focussed and effective.

4. Expenditure in Some Sectors Increases
Despite the doom and gloom surrounding the housing and holiday markets predominantly, we’ve noticed that people are actually spending more on smaller luxury items such as clothes, jewellery or even, ringtones as a treat in lieu of a holiday, new car etc. This is actually good news for some of our ecommerce customers who are seeing an increase in business for smaller, more luxury items. Harnessing this through increased PPC is actually a good idea for some people right now, despite the news of a downturn.

So, internet marketing is thriving then?

Although the slow down in business is obvious to see, we’re actually seen an increase in some of our online marketing business with customers working that bit harder to make their businesses grow online. Internet marketing and SEO is cost effective, quick to react and above all else very trackable.

At times like these, dropping advertising and promotion is not an option but changing focus to becoming more targetted and focussed has got to be the number one priority… and internet marketing and SEO is perfect for this.