Seeing Woolworths and MFI both recently collapse into administration is never good news. I can’t even imagine a high street without a Woolworths on it? Where will I buy my DVD’s and general household knickknacks from now – well actually I feel guilty as I have to put my hand up and admit that I now get most of these items online. Like a lot of people this switch in buying patterns has taken a lot of business away from high street stores.

It’s a sad fact but these two prominent retail names are just two of the latest casualties of the UK economic downturn. So it’s understandable in the current economic climate that businesses are restricting and seriously squeezing their marketing budgets. However the reality still stands that search engines will continue to be the most popular way in which people will look for information and purchase products or services nowadays.

More than 85 percent of the world’s online population has used the Internet to make a purchase – increasing the market for online shopping by 40 percent in the past two years – according to the latest Nielsen Global Online Survey on Internet shopping habits. Globally, more than half of Internet users have made at least one purchase online in the past month.  In the UK alone, 97 percent of those who have Internet access have used it to shop online and that includes me!

So in a time of potential recession businesses need to refine themselves and focus their efforts where the potential for business is at its greatest – online. This means that businesses need to establish an online presence and raise their game to convince search engines that their website is responsive to the needs of online searchers.

To achieve high visibility on search engines and to start generating relevant traffic to your website to help capture some of that potential market online then an ongoing search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy has to be applied to your website. While a search engine optimisation strategy can be very effective in generating more traffic to your website, the best SEO strategy will really depend on the needs of your actual website. Factors such as how much competition there is for your product or service, how popular the keywords are you wish to target, the usability of your website and how many inbound links you have pointing to your website from other websites. All these SEO elements have to be considered before carrying out a search engine optimisation campaign.

The reality is that to succeed in this current economic climate and to come out running when the economy stabilizes again you have to allocate a majority of your marketing budget towards online marketing and get your website noticed in search engines. Now you may be thinking “but this advice is coming from an individual who works for White Hat Media, a provider of SEO services, so of course they are going to promote the benefits of SEO”. This is not the case and if you are reading this blog entry then I can almost guarantee you use the Internet for shopping too. This is how today’s society operates and now the Internet is the biggest purchasing platform for goods and services.

With the growing use of the Internet in general and the rise of social media communities, means that search engine optimisation is fertile ground for all types of businesses and despite the credit crunch seems to have a very bright future ahead of it.

So the question is with the UK economy in decline, can you afford NOT to use search engine optimisation (SEO) or any other form of online search marketing to generate sales?

Posted on Friday, November 28th, 2008 at 2:10 pm in Archive, Blogroll, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.