Internet marketing to boom in South Africa

[Koz]

Hi was reading an article on Silicon.com on how Europeans are to spend €100bn (909bn Rand!) online this year. A online shopper in Europe will reportadly spend an average of €1,000 (R9,100) each. Impressive considering there are 100 million of them. The areas most benifiting seems to be in leisure, e.g. travel, wine clubs, etc. Jaap Favier, research director consumer markets at Forrester Research predicts these areas to grow between 133% - 283% in the next five years. E-Commerce sales are expected to rise to €263bn (over R3 trillion) by 2011. I'm sure some of this growth can be attributed to online companies using more search engine optimisation (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) methods than before.

It looks like South Africa and the rest of Africa aren't going to be left out either. According to a report in allAfrica.com earlier this year, Africa is gaining internet connectivity faster than any other region, with South Africa having the most internet users. It is believed that international bandwidth to Africa will grow by 81% between 2005 - 2008. View our SEO Blog (http://www.digital-m.co.za/seo-blog/2006_05_01_archive.html) for a report on this article.

Not only does this boom in connectivity to Africa promote free speech and democracy, it is no doubt growing our online shopping and online marketing industries. With this connectivity boom along with South African online shopping companies using SEO, SEM and online marketing methods, we are sure to see sales growth to rival that of the European industry's.

[Paz]

Yes there's certainly a lot of potential in South Africa but I had no idea they were buying so much stuff online in europe; it's an astonishing amount of money - nearly 10,000 Rand each!!

It's a pity they don't say what they were spending their money on, but my guess is they are booking their holidays online. In other words, they're spending it locally maybe.

I think it's too early to realise anything like that sort of money here, but I'm wondering how much of that european money could be diverted this way. I've looked at the search engine rankings for holidays in South Africa and related terms in google.com and I'm seeing a lot of evidence of search engine optimisation, backlink campaigns etc. but I didn't see many SA domains and travel market didn't look very competitive. So with a solid internet marketing campaign it should be relatively easy for a .co.za domain to rank for most terms.

In 2010 the World Cup is coming to South Africa, which will see a huge growth and investment in local companies and suppliers. I'm sure much of that business will come via the net somehow.

Get ready everyone. Register your travel/leisure domains now and they should be out of the sandbox in time for the build up to the World Cup!

Cheers,
Paz.

[Chatmaster]

Yep, the past 2 years there has been a phenominal growth in online confidence. I also firmly believe it has allot to do with the economical position of the country at the moment being extremely healthy.