According to the Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report 60% of companies plan to increase the amount they spend on digital marketing next year. The Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report which is compiled by Econsultancy look at how companies in the US and UK allocate their digital marketing budgets both on and off line. It claims that companies in the UK are looking to increase their SEO budget with 10%. A further 52% of companies have also indicated that they will increase their PPC budget. For SEO that is an increase of 15% from last year and 7% for PPC. SEO spending has seen a 2% increase in companies who spend more than £50,000 and a 4% increase in UK companies who spend more than £50,000 a year on paid searches. Econsultancy’s research director, Linus Gregoriadis, further commented on how resilient the SEO market has been throughout the recession.
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Further surveys conducted by Econsultancy showed that social media marketing is also increasing with companies. More companies are planning to start using off-site social media such as Facebook and Twitter and those companies already using this as a SEO tool plan to increase their social media budgets by 15%. According to the Benchmark Report the use of copywriting will see a 4% decline. Overall paid search emerged as the best approach for measuring ROI (return on investment) with the general restriction to companies’ search marketing efforts appearing to be the lack of marketing budget and internal resources and poorly converting websites.
