Early indications are that the spending on search engine marketing (SEM) will continue to grow in 2009. Companies are continuing to reap the benefit that a strong SEM campaign can provide to their ROI and show no signs of pulling out of this form of marketing. eMarketer.com has predicted that there will be steady growth of around 9% of online spending in the US with the figures likely to be similar in the UK and Europe in 2009.

With the term credit crunch now part of the everyday vocabulary, the ROI that companies are seeing with their SEM campaigns is helping to buck the trend of other industries that are reporting falling sales figures. The money spent on SEM is expected to be over £8 billion for 2009 according to the eMarketer report, which will be a rise of 14.9% on 2008. In the US the total spending on internet ads is also forecast to increase to $17.5 billion, an increase of just under 9%.

This backs up the argument put forward by David Hallerman of eMarketer that SEM is now viewed as an essential marketing tool by a wide range of organisations. Hallerman went on to say, “with search being highly measurable it will maintain its place in many budgets, whilst it is not recession proof it is recession resistant.”

Whatever way you look at it businesses still regard their overall SEM spending to be of great importance in the coming year despite the worries affecting everything else at this time. Search engine marketing still remains one of the best value tools out there for delivering a solid ROI, no matter the financial climate.

Posted on Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 at 4:25 pm in Industry News, Search Engine Marketing. 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.