The last week has been a hairy old time for the global stock markets, and as ever it caused a shudder of unease amongst the UK business community. News of the impact of the credit crunch on the global finance industry has been widely reported, as has the reigning-in of spend on the high-street, with consumers apparently tightening their belts. But what is less certain at this point is the impact on everything inbetween: in other words, the B2B economy. To my knowledge, there is no research available on the correlation between business spend and consumer spend, and the impact of one on the other. There is bound to be some kind of relationship, but I suspect it’s quite complex. If it’s out there, I’d love to know about it.

So what should we expect? Will business expenditure drop-off at the same rate that high street spending apparently did before Xmas? The last significant downturn certainly decimated the IT sector, but this was largely because of the industry’s close links with the dotcom bubble, and the myriad of unsustainable Web 1.0 businesses. This time around there is no reason to expect a similar impact, and given the growing importance of technology to most companies in all aspects of their business, theoretically investment may hold up relatively well, particularly amongst the large corporates, who have more structured investment plans.

The one group that will probably change their behaviour, however, are the small businesses, who – like the man in the street – feel most exposed when the economy wobbles.

But that certainly isn’t to say that companies should stop all marketing to small businesses (or large ones, for that matter) when the economic outlook becomes uncertain. As research from the consumer world shows, those companies with strong brands and those who maintain marketing dialogue perform best both during and in the immediate aftermath of a downturn.

After all, we still don’t know how serious the current situation is, and how long it will last. Once the big banks sort out their exposure to bad US mortgage debt once and for all, then the supply of credit will improve dramatically and with it the prospects for the economy generally. And when this happens, B2B brands have to be ready. We all hope this is sooner rather than later.

The search engines work as a gigantic indexing system for the World Wide Web. Just as a database in a library indexes and stores all its books, the search engines store most of the world’s websites. Each search engine run automated programs often called “bots” or “spiders” that use the hyperlink between web pages to “crawl” and then index the pages within their massive database. It’s estimated that there are around 20 billion web pages in the World Wide Web, and that the search engines have crawled around 8-10 billion of them.

When someone searches for a keyword/phrase the search engines process the queries, match them to the most appropriate results, according to the search engine algorithm (the mathematical equation of how to rank a site). And lastly sort and display the results according to relevance, from most relevant at the top to the least at the bottom.

In the below illustration (which is genius by the way) you have two search engine spiders (one Google spider and one Yahoo spider, how cute!) following the links between tube stations (websites), the tube line is the link between station to station (website to website).



Illustration courtesy of SEOmoz, (thanks Rand, I love this illustration!)

Crawl then Index
When a search engine spider visit a website it reads all the content and follows all the links internally, and then it decides what to index the webpage for. This is why it is SO crucial to have search engine optimised content on your website. If there is no search engine visible content on your website (mostly meaning content in HTML), the search engines won’t  know what to index your website for and you might be indexed for keywords that are not related to your business.

Recommended Tools
To see how the search engines view your website check out SE Spider.com
For finding out whether the search engines have any problems crawling your site check out SEOmoz’s Crawl Test Tool

Any tools you want to share with us? Or any SEO related questions about your website please leave a comment!

Next week: learn about the difference between being indexed by the search engine and ranked highly in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages)!
 

We’ve just started 2008, so what does it have instore for the earnest marketer? What channels will the market be investing in and what will suffer. I’m going to have a quick stab at a couple of forecasts… prepare yourself to be shouted down Farmer!

 

Up to this point, email marketing has never been utilised so much as an immediate and cost effective tool in lead generation and direct sales. However, I see the worm turning in 08. Not that all email marketing will end, or should, but with everybody on the bandwagon, email is becoming swamped! Marketing emails from legitimate companies now feel like spam. I now only read emails from media sources and companies I already do business with. It is not that the other emails are necessary bad, it is just I do not have time to read each one. I am not the only person suffering. This is a real shame, as email is a great medium and has it place. But the volume of email is staring to grate, even with spam filters working overtime!

 

With companies seeing their open rates dip, opt-out lists grow and response rates slip, I believe they will only look to broadcast their own emails to clients and pre-validated prospects, using quality tools from suppliers to produce them. For new prospects, companies will piggyback on email distributions from respected media sources, associations etc, for assured quality and exposure. Without this change, companies risk doing more damage than good. No one wants to be associated with spam.

 

What will be a winner in 2008? My money is on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Whoever has set up a SEO specialist outfit should do well this year! A staggering 70-80% of traffic on search engines is generated via natural search (left side). Get your SEO sorted and the volume of traffic to your site should fly. Easier said than done, and it costs. Everybody wants to be number one on a search. However, the most competitive space is now in sponsored search (right side). Hence greater investment in natural search has got to make good marketing sense, especially as sponsored search has become more expensive.  It sounds a little old hat, but it is amazing how many firms have still to embrace this.

 

Each sector has it’s own issues in 2008. One rule does not fit all. However, I think that 2008 will be a more proactive year for marketers. Strategy and planning has been all the rage, but only action produces results. The sense I get from the market is that more focus will be on running the ‘integrated marketing campaign’ with less time just talking about it.