One of the city’s oldest web marketing agencies appears to have shut its doors after 15 years servicing Melbourne’s small and medium business sectors.
Questions remain as to the nature of it’s closure, but an explosion of new competitors coupled with tepid business conditions have contributed to the closure of many digital agencies over the years.
Added to this pressure, recent Google updates have also squeezed many smaller trades businesses out of the market as their local SEO firms were unable to adapt or the price of clicks on Google advertising continued to increase. Just last week Google started transitioning away from the right hand advertising column for many search phrases.
This situation brings us back to the fact that everyone seems to be a digital marketer these days. The low end of the web development market has been owned by offerings from Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, Yola…the list goes on. While we wouldn’t recommend these platforms for anyone serious about their web presence they do provide an easy way to get online fast with a basic presence. Failing this, most business owners are only one or two family members away from knowing ‘some guy’ who can sort out their online needs. The problem is that nearly every time, you’re dealing with an amateur. If you think hiring a professional is expensive, wait until you pay for an amateur.
It would be easy if you could ring up your top 3 competitors and ask them who they use, except they will never tell you. There are some sneaky ways to find out if, like us, you know what you’re doing. Failing that, get an independent online marketing expert to point you in the right direction – by now you know at least one.