As the recession hit, most web design companies were busier than they had ever been before. There seemed to be a sudden rush of businesses trying to get online. In the majority of cases it was a knee-jerk reaction to prop up their falling incomes. During the latter half of 2009, this sudden rush seemed to have abated. There are many stories flying around that some of the major web design companies in Ireland are hanging on by the skin of their teeth and offering well below cost websites in order to generate some sort of cash flow.
Although they say that 99% of all statistics are made up, it’s still worth looking at some…
Google Trends is a great tool for researching keyphrase search popularity over a number of years of traffic on Google. So I used this tool to run a few searches on terms relating to web design to see if it could paint any sort of picture of what the state of the web design is in.
As you can see from above graph, the search term “web design” has been on a massive decline since the recording of the statistics began. Interestingly, if you take a close look at the latter quarter of 2009, you can also see a steady decline in searches for “web design”.
December is generally a slow time for new business in web design terms, so there are no surprises when you see the massive dips in searches across all years. Also quite interesting, is the steady performance of the term “website design”. In fact, there’s possibly a slight growth in searches for this term throughout 2009.
Does this mean that the web design industry has finally entered the recession with everyone else?
Only time will tell I guess…
Looking at the other side of our business; online marketing, it appears to be performing quite well. There is an obvious increase in searches for “SEO” – everyone seems to know what it is now or at least know someone that fancies themselves as one. There is a decline in searches for “Internet Marketing” though, maybe a phrase that has been lost to the popularity of “SEO”.
Although it’s hard to see from this graph, there has been a surge in searches for “Social Media Marketing“, which started showing up on the radar in 2007. No surprises there, since it’s the latest and greatest buzz word on the planet!
We’ll never get a true picture of the web design or online marketing industry from statistics like this. For example, the searches for “SEO” are being diluted by people trying to figure out how to market their own websites rather than actually looking for those services. None-the-less it’s interesting reading for anyone in or trying to get into this industry.

#1 by Leon at January 7th, 2010
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Interesting. I could probably agree my web design work has slowed slightly but I have been meaning to go into SEO a lot more and got my first 4 jobs in SEO just before Xmas..
One other thing. Might people be sourcing web designers through social media channels rather than searches?
#2 by Tom Doyle at January 7th, 2010
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You brave man!!! I’ve been trying to ease myself out of it!
Agree with you on the social media channels – something I didn’t look into at all. It would be interesting to run a survey on that.
#3 by Tom Doyle at January 7th, 2010
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Well it’s just getting more and more difficult to rank. Managing clients expectations is harder, because someone told then that they just had to “do this”. For example, if I hear “all you need to do is have a blog”, I’ll scream!
There are still many sites that are useless and could use SEO, but anyone that takes it serious will have already done something about it! With all new websites, we completely optimise the site – so it’s the offsite work that is needed. That is also getting more difficult and time consuming to do.
So all in all – the job is just getting more difficult by the day!
#4 by Leon at January 7th, 2010
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Why so, something I should know!?
Seems a lot of people have useless sites or site they don’t know what to do with so looks like the thing to get into to help them out..
#5 by Leon at January 7th, 2010
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I suppose what I meant by me getting into SEO was both SEO and Internet Marketing, the whole shebang of getting your site up there…