How to spend your website budget in tough times

Attended a useful presentation at the Jersey Chamber of Commerce monthly lunch meeting today.

It was given by Paul Say, Head of Marketing and Communications at HSBC Bank International and previously Head of Digital marketing in the UK for all HSBC brands.

Paul gave a great jargon-free overview of the priorities for anyone doing business online. In conversation with him after the seminar I asked him the question, "If you had £1000 to spend on your website in the current climate, how would you split it between search engine optimisation (SEO), pay per click advertising (PPC) and usability improvement?"

His answer surprised me, because he had made much in his presentation of the importance of getting high quality traffic to your site, and talked about the effectiveness of both SEO work and PPC for HSBC. He told me that 40% of his notional £1000 would be spent on SEO work, 40% on usability work and 20% on pay per click. I think his analysis is good. SEO is a longer term investment than PPC, and both are important for a trading site. (My friends at Webdiverseon can help you with both!)

The interesting bit for me is to hear an eminent online marketer supporting my contention that now's the time to be investing in improving what you've got with a strong focus on usability testing and improvement.

The online winners in the downturn will be the ones who keep investing in getting traffic to their site and invest in making it as easy as possible for people to transact when they get there.