Search engine marketing industry grows

14:00 20th January 2010

Search engine marketing is becoming a more important method of gaining business for companies, with the industry growing throughout 2009 in the US.

A report by performance marketing company Efficient Frontier said US retail companies in particular had turned to search engine marketing as a tool to bring consumers to their business.

In the last quarter of the year the retail sector spent 46 per cent more on search engine marketing than in the previous three months, with a year-on-year growth of 17 per cent.

Efficient Frontier chief executive and president David Karnstedt said he expected growth to continue during 2010.

He said: "The fourth quarter results and the 2010 outlook paint a much rosier picture than we've seen in more than a year. While certain sectors, such as travel, continue to lag, we expect overall growth to exceed 15 per cent for the full year 2010."

However, not all businesses have come round to the idea of spending money on search engine marketing, with spending dropping by two per cent year-on-year in both the finance and car industries.

Search engine marketers were advised last week that traffic patterns move in weekly cycles.

David Roth, director of search engine marketing for Yahoo!, told Search Engine Land that marketers who were testing patterns of search traffic should avoid periods of volatility such as holidays.