There has been some interesting predictions this week, most notably from industry voice E-consultancy who have predicted that the expenditure in search engine marketing is likely to be nearly £2.8 billion by the end of the current year, an increase of around 25% year on year. That’s a fairly healthy growth prediction, especially if you believe the doom and gloom about the economic outlook.

So why are the well respected E-consultancy group predicting this rise? To start with, we are in the middle of an upwards curve when it comes to online spend. The growth has been evident for a number of years and will more than likely continue so for the next few years before finding a nice level.

The growth in online spend has not been without casualties, above the line advertising has been steadily slowing, in fact it is predicted that online spend will overtake television advertising spend in the next few years.. If a business has not had their marketing budget reduced, then they are most likely having conversations about where the best place to put their marketing pounds might be. This means we are getting closer to the real reason why E-consultancy are absolutely correct.

Businesses are making decisions to put more of their budget into online marketing strategies. The business decision is the fact that they can quickly measure a return on investment. They can quickly see the results of their campaigns and they know they have more chance of reaching their targeted audience who have money to spend. Altogether they have a more potent marketing weapon.

So it is a pretty safe bet that online advertising spend will continue to grow for the next few years. Although, we do think that the market will become more competitive. Traditionally agencies will extend their digital capabilities, design companies will introduce new services, which should lead to some consolidation in the market.

As competition grows, the agency fees will start to be eroded. This is an interesting debate that is waiting to happen. What parts of online advertising services can be commoditised? I’ve already seen companies offering email marketing and SEO type solutions for incredibly low fees. Is this good for the market or does it confuse our customers?

In summary, search engine marketing is in a very healthy position. There will almost certainly be more competition for each customer and that should should be welcomed. However, for the time being; measurable marketing and performance management seem to be winning out, this is why online marketing will continue with steady growth. It is the agencies who need to watch out for the recession, especially those who are not innovating and helping their clients to deliver winning campaigns.

Search Marketing - The next battle ground for your brand?

In the UK just over 15% of of the total media spend is now spent on online advertising. This trend is set to continue with year on year growth expected at around 40%. By the end of this decade it is widely expected that online advertising will replace television as the leading advertising platform in this country.

The vast majority (nearly 60%) of the online budget is being spent on various forms of pay per click. The 800 pound gorilla in this market is obviously Google, other well know companies here include Yahoo and Microsoft. The attraction of pay per click as a tool for acquiring new customers or clicks to your site is incomparable. It may not be the most cost effective or scalable solution, however it certainly delivers the goods.

Currently, we believe that there is an opportunity for companies to reduce or compliment their pay per click campaigns with traditional search engine optimisation. We recognise that product launches and instant results can often only be accelerated with a pay per click strategy, however optimising for the search engines as well will reduce your customer acquisition costs, increase your branding, increase your traffic and hopefully positively impact your bottom line.

We’re starting to see the start of this trend now. Just this week MTV announced that they were going to concentrate on their search branding. They want to revamp their association with new and upcoming music and therefore improve their relationship with their core younger audience. They will do this by being associated in the search results for up and coming bands or via the names of their TV programmes. Basically, they want to increase their search engine presence as they have worked out that people who are searching for details of whatever new hip hop act is flavour of the day, do not use the search for MTV. This means there are hundreds and thousands of potential MTV clickers out there they currently do not reach.

Once this penny drops, companies will begin to leverage the natural search engine results and proactively try to influence them in different ways than today. Naturally, this could mean a slight reduction in the pay per click budget, however we think that the search budget will actually be increased and the pay per click budget will grow at a steady rate.

The great thing about search engine marketing is that in terms of cost it can be considerably lower than pay per click. Most if not all of it can be achieved in house if you had the right resources and skills. We run a number of Search Marketing Courses in the UK, our students tend to have the same skills requirements, below is a list of the most popular areas we cover:

- Do your keyword research, making sure you understand what your customers are using to search for you.
- Invest in your pages, have one for each product, service or solution that you have. Each of these pages can then be optimised. If you’re worried about how manageable your site might be, consider a web content management system.
- Make sure your site is search engine friendly, this is both on site and off site.
- Run monthly reports with your search engine consultants so that you can track the keyword success

If you do not want to take ownership of this inhouse, then you might want to work with an SEO consultancy. Naturally, we at Generate UK would be delighted to help, however this blog posting is not a pitch it is supposed to be a helpful guide. So we’ve listed below the key criteria that we use to help make our search engine marketing projects a success.

- Who owns the project. All projects require senior stakeholders and support, it is no different with search engine marketing and branding. If the project is supported, it can be strongly project managed.

- What are the objectives. This sounds like a no brainer but unfortunately often missed. This should involve; where you are and where you want to be.

- Target the right vehicle. By this we mean that you should focus on the search engine that means the most to you and offers the most potential to your business.

- Keywords and keyphrases. This is one of the areas we cover on our Internet Marketing course. our students will tell you how important we think keyword research is; without it, your project is doomed from the start.

- Content. The right content that is both search engine friendly, focused on your customer and includes the right number of keywords. It really is that simple!

- Pay per click. If you’re using pay per click make sure that you know what your bid prices are and have a budget. Agree beforehand what the maximum is that you will pay for a click.

- Landing Pages. If you’re spending lots of money on pay per click and search marketing, you have to make sure that your pages sell or capture or whatever it is that you decided was your objective.

- Analytics. One of the main reasons that online advertising spend will eclipse television is that it is immediately available to analyse, and it is very important you do.

- Was it worthwhile. Once you have analysed a campaign, you will be able to tell whether you had a decent return on investment.

- Review, review, review. Whatever campaign you send out, whatever keyword you are tracking and whatever new page you are creating it is vital that you have a culture of review. Constant tweaks and improvements can be the difference between sales and no sales.

As you can see, there is a real opportunity for companies to leverage the search engines in a different way to how they are currently doing it. It is a world of new prospects and branding opportunities, it is a world of proactive search management and a world that is still being defined.

We’d be delighted to hear from you if you have anything to add to this post, use the comments box below.