Traffic has always been at the forefront of supporting social and good-hearted causes. From rendering free technical solutions to helping raise funds for charities, we have always endeavoured to increase the social impact of our organization both locally and internationally. 

Recently, as part of our CSR agenda for 2012, our Managing Director, Johnny Huntington, signed-up to run the Dubai Marathon, to raise money for Hope and Homes for Children, a charity that helps children and families in dire need. 

Hope and Homes for Children is an international charity with a mission to give hope to the poorest children in the world. The charity helps orphaned, abandoned or vulnerable children in Eastern Europe and Africa to fulfil their potential by moving them out of institutions into family based care. It also provides vital support to families that are threatened by breakdown due to poverty, disease or conflict and works to prevent child abandonment. 

"It’s a cause close to my heart" exclaimed Johnny, “Hope and Homes for Children is an international organization that helps children grow in safe and productive environments. One Hundred per cent of the proceeds of the run will go directly to supporting their work.”

Traffic raised £663 (AED 3,800) for the charity event, which took place on Friday, January 27, 2012.

Facebook completely dominated social networking in 2011 - a trend reflected in social networking in the United Arab Emirates.

According to StatCounter’s 2011 statistics, Facbook with 87.88 percent of the market share dominated social media in the United Arab Emirates in 2011. Youtube help the second spot with 4.11 per cent, followed by StumbleUpon and Twitter at 3.5 per cent and 3.3 percent respectively.

The poor showing for supposedly star performers like Twitter and Google+ (included in the Others category) is not surprising. Most users in the Middle East are still playing “catch-up” to micro blogs and Facebook killers. Nonetheless Twitter is gaining momentum, even if it’s at the expense of StumbleUpon, which lost 3.6 per cent of its market share in the last quarter of 2011. 

Apart from its success on social networking, Facebook is also usurping the traditional strongholds of search giants like Google, Yahoo and Bing. People are spending more time on Facebook than on Google, or than on Yahoo and Bing combined. In fact 2011 became the first year when a social network thrash search engines in this particular category – a big bust for search engines.

The web is changing and uses across the world are changing with it. Let’s see how the old-web does against the now-web in 2012.

We all know that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a crucial element of web success. In 2011 alone, more than 300 million people used search engines every day, while globally search engine usage remained on a 10 per cent growth curve throughout the year – indomitable figures indeed. But how important is SEO to businesses in the Middle East? To gauge the affects of SEO on regional businesses, we decided to conduct a study of our own. 

The study was based on analysis of client feedback from more than twenty companies that use our SEO Dubai solutions. The survey covered clients from a variety of industries including real estate, insurance, banking, and government organizations, and was exclusively designed to identify the relevance of SEO to businesses operating in the region. 

Around 62 percent of the companies surveyed reported that SEO improved their website’s ROI by a margin of 30 per cent. Of these companies, 33 per cent confirmed that SEO improved their site’s lead generation by 51.1 per cent, while 47 per cent of the surveyed companies reported an increase in lead generation by 35 per cent. Although results vary between B2B and B2C markets, almost 80 per cent of our clients reported that SEO improved their site’s traffic by a whopping 79.8 per cent within the designated campaign period. 

“Our findings show that local companies have realized the marketing potential of Search Engine Optimization,” says Johnny Huntington, Managing Director Traffic. “Our results are in line with recent studies conducted in Europe, which suggest that search engine optimization remains the most valuable tool for increasing company brand visibility, and increasing a site’s traffic, leads and conversions.” 

Moreover the study proved that SEO is an extremely cost-effective means of marketing. The date revealed that in terms of dollar value our clients regarded SEO as a more efficient tool than Social Media Marketing (SMM) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads. On average our clients allocated no more than 13.3 per cent of their annual marketing budget to SEO, and were extremely pleased with the “apparent” ROI. 

Algorithms aren’t going away anytime soon, and given the widening accessibility, affordability and understanding of SEO in the Middle East, the competition for SERPs will definitely become tougher in the future. This is precisely why 95 per cent of the companies we surveyed plan to keep SEO as part of their 2012 marketing budget. In fact, 52 per cent of the surveyed companies plan to “increase” their SEO budget in the coming year.  

To find out how SEO can help you generate leads, sales and conversions, and how it can help your site grow and prosper in the ultra-competitive environment of the Middle East, contact Traffic today.