Everyone is feeling the recession, the majority of our clients are worried about it. The internet is definatley worried about it with UK online stats company Hitwise showing that the popularity of uk voucher sites has gone through the roof towards the end of 2008 and stayed strong in 2009
While entertainment and electronics retailers do best from discount vouchers, department stores and fashion retailers benefit most from the sales. ‘Next sale’ is always the top term during sales season and over the last 12 weeks has accounted for almost 1 in every 20 sales searches. Other fashion related searches in the top 20 over this period included: Debenhams, BHS, M&S, ASOS, Boden, Monsoon and River Island.
Here at Webbuilt4u we had a meeting early in January where we discussed the recession and how it was going to affect us as a company going into 2009. Obviously like any other business, we need work to be able to pay the bills. We have carried our strong end of 2008 into 2009 and have had one of our best week for new business ever this past week. How did we do this you might be thinking, well it’s very simple. We don’t rest on our laurels here, we had no intention of riding out the recession. We powered through the past 2 weeks with more Marketing, more meetings and more improvements to clients sites than ever before. 95% of our clients sites are receiving more traffic so far in January 2009 than they did in the corresponding time period last year.
We’re currently improving our website, overhauling the portfolio. We have deleted our old facebook presence and reinvented it with something new.
You can also follow exactly what we are doing inside the Webbuilt4u HQ by keeping an eye on this blog.
In other company news we’re about to launch quite a few new sites, but i’m sure i’ll blog about that next Friday. We also sent out a newsletter, our first of 2009. Expect lots more newsletters this year, as Matt has taken responsibility for them and he’s generally the best person at remembering stuff round these parts.
Elsewhere on the Internets this week, Aaron Wall from Seobook.com released an astonishing SEO toolbar. It does everything I ahve ever wanted from a toolbar, and has even made me remove the Google one!
And more from our friends/enemies at Google, when man of the people Matt Cutts and his web spam team vowed to get rid of all those crappy little review sites with no reviews for anything on them. I’m really happy about this, as I mentioned a few months ago on this very blog, I was burgled and had to replace all sorts of electrical items that were stolen. And searchin for specific products threw up loads of these pointless sites.
This amazing CCTV Camera from somewhere impressed me, I bet I wouldn’t have been burgled if I had a few of these patrolling the grounds.
Right’ i’ll leave you with that and get back to optimising websites and reporting on them.
