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Tuesday, March 20th, 2012
The UK’s Internet marketing and search engine optimisation industry is now worth more than £500m, according to a report by Econsultancy.
The online marketers’ site released the SEO Agencies Buyer’s Guide on March 19, with figures showing an 18% leap in the SEO market in 2011.
Econsultancy says the year-end value of SEO in the UK was around £514m – up from £436m in 2010.
The 2012 SEO Agencies Buyer’s Guide breaks down the valuation: explaining it was calculated using payments to agencies, investment and specialist costs for PR or social media marketing campaigns.
“It’s great to see that natural search has developed into a half-billion pound industry in the UK,” said Jake Hird, senior research analyst for Econsultancy.
“This also demonstrates the shifting landscape of the SEO marketplace. Now, search practitioners have to deal with elements such as social, mobile and local search, as well as continuing to optimise for other types of content, such as videos and images.”
The Econsultancy report also drew a correlation between SEO activity and other kinds of online marketing: with SEO becoming intrinsically important for PR, social media, content marketing and on-page information.
The report also looks at trends, changes and predictions for SEO, such as the focus on Google+, mobile search and increasing integration of SEO with other marketing campaigns.
The guide is aimed at companies looking to hire an SEO agency, with a breakdown of the UK’s most successful online marketing firms, together with their costs, services and achievements.
The guide is available to buy through Econsultancy.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, Pay Per Click Services, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
Tags: buyers guide, Content, Econsultancy, Google, industry, marketing, search, SEO, UK
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation
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Friday, August 19th, 2011
Following the UK riots, the major social media companies, including RIM, have been summoned to appear before the government to discuss the option to close down the major social networks in the event of similar ‘uprisings’ occurring again.
When news first broke with the suspicion that BBM (Blackberry Messenger) was being used to quickly inform large numbers of people about plans for disorder, many were discussing the potential to close down the network to prevent further spread of the BBMs. Some of the BBM messages were posted online as evidence of its use.
However, as swift action was not taken to do such, then it began to occur to more people that giving the government the right to take this level of action in a crisis could seriously affect freedom of speech, as well as businesses. The government has loudly condemned the actions of countries such as China and Libya closing down networks in the past, so it would seem marginally hypocritical to do the same in the UK.
It also clearly ignores the positive benefits that social networks have brought in similar circumstances viz Egypt, and also the UK riots when the voluntary clean ups organised via Twitter eg under the #riotwombles and #riotscleanup hashtags, must have saved the UK taxpayer, councils and businesses a fortune.
This approach also misses the fact that a huge amount of information was disseminated through the social networks which helped to provide photos, facts and allay the fears of many who were often poorly informed by the mass media and government. Whilst news crews were being attacked, and hence not venturing into the hardest hit areas until after the event, people who were present eg by virtue of living or working in the location were providing factual accounts, pictures and videos of the actuality of the situation.
If networks such as social media were to be closed down, en masse or in certain locations, whether for the duration of a crisis, or more likely for far longer than the actual disturbance, this could cause expensive havoc for businesses, who have begun to rely on social media marketing as an integral arrow to their online marketing bows. In addition, Blackberry is quite often the phone and network of choice for enterprises and businesses, and making it impossible to use for any length of time could only harm those businesses who use Research in Motion hardware and products. This usage is often company wide and losing that communications capacity could cause millions and millions of pounds worth of daily losses UK wide.
Should the government be allowed to take such a decision and could it do more harm than good? Many companies are seeing a hefty percentage of their revenue now coming from online sources and the Internet is one of the biggest sources of UK revenue now (according to Google’s Connected Kingdom report), generating over £100billion per year, and making the Internet a larger sector than transport, construction and utilities. Can we really afford to shut down any section of it, for any reason?
Businesses should begin to speak out about the government having the power to do so because it seems more a knee jerk reaction to the problem, when the government should focus on the causes of the problem. There also needs to be a wholesale acceptance that more good than harm may have been done by keeping the networks open and accessible for the duration of the riots, and business leaders should be speaking out as a matter of urgency before the meeting next Thursday.
The impact on business at a time of recession, or even at any point in the future, could prove disastrous.
Tags: BBM, blackberry messenger, business, closure, facebook, government, impact, network, recession, Research in Motion, riots, social networks, twitter, UK
Posted in Blog, Social Media
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Friday, March 25th, 2011
The first edition of Think Quarterly is all about data, and it is telling that the introduction mentions the aspect of speed – to connect, to market, to share, to shout etc.
The Executive Insight actually reinforces something that will be in our next book about social media – stop focussing on numbers. Whilst you need to know them, you do not always need to rely on or share them. You need to understand them, and react to the information behind the stats.
CEO of Vodafone, Guy Laurence cannily states:
You have to take the action you think will work and the numbers follow.
Google adds:
Data is something that informs his hunches – but never rules them.
Are you, as a company, spending so much time analysing marketing data that you are not taking timely decisions? You won’t be alone if you answer “Yes”.
UK companies need to start to act, rather than react to expensive consultancy projects that say what worked last year. Is something working today? Great, then keep doing it. Did it work yesterday but has dropped off today? Then change.
In a connected world, that change can be as simple as changing the hashtags you include on your tweets. Linking to new companies or trends. In the olde worlde, the oil tanker mentality meant that it could take literally months to change track. Now you can do it in 140 characters.
The ThinkQuarterly ‘magazine’ has thousands of similar insights that your business can read and apply over the coming months. Take an hour out over lunch, and then change the course of your business this afternoon.
Tags: expertise, Google, newsletter, search marketing, thinkquarterly, UK
Posted in Blog, Google, SEM Industry
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Monday, August 3rd, 2009
The latest top 30 rankings from TopSEOS for August 2009 has been released.
Two UK companies, WebLinx Ltd and High Position Ltd continue to feature in the international list, which is good news for our search industry. The UK top SEO rankings show little change at the top; however there are three new entrants in the ranking list.
There is a rigorous evaluation of companies applying for a ranking, including speaking to at least three clients, and consideration of both on and off page optimisation, as well as keywords analysis and reporting methods.
Tags: ranking, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, UK
Posted in SEM Industry, SEO
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Friday, November 21st, 2008
A new Ofcom report out this week highlights the fact that the UK is fast becoming an advanced digital nation.
Firstly, in adoption and use of new technologies, Ofcom reports that the UK consumers are embracing new digital services, as well as being prolific in their uses of mobile phones, both for calls, texts and now mobile broadband. It is becoming increasingly important to ensure that your website works on mobile platforms, as we have posted about previously.
Although ad revenues for TV are down, and now are being overtaken by subscriptions, the shift for advertising has been to online strategies.
£1 in every £5 of ad spend is now online, making internet marketing in the UK one of the highest in the countries surveyed, and up by a third on 2006. For anyone still unsure about where to put their marketing budget for 2009, this type of research surely makes it a no brainer! Call your Internet Marketing company today!
Tags: IM, mobile, UK
Posted in Mobile Search, SEM Industry, Stats & Trends
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