Offline Money

Image via Wikipedia

More encouraging news as reported come in from comscore regarding Christmas spendings in the US for 2009. With all the downfalls of our economic times, it seems we still know how to spend money to maintain growth.

According to comscore, holiday season retail e-commerce spending for the entirety of the November – December 2009 holiday season. For the full holiday online shopping season, $29.1 billion was spent online, marking a 4-percent increase versus the same period last year. The season featured distinct periods of strong spending growth surrounding the Thanksgiving-Black Friday timeframe and the final shopping week leading up to Christmas.

In recent changes to Google’s way of life, we have seen a difference in local results for US/Canada and UK google local search.

The ’7pack’ as it is known (the local map with ~7 businesses listed at the beginning of search results – Local Search) was easy, and still is.
What you need to keep in mind now, and inevitably forever, is that should you choose to be adding a SEO or webdesign business to local search, you will know longer see it when searching for example: San Francisco SEO Service will only show “natural results”. By simply changing the search to SEO Service in San Francisco it will now show the ’7pack’.

Image by Danard Vincente via Flickr

As Christmas approaches, we get to see exactly what the first half of this shopping season has done for online business. The November period has proven to be quite promising in an economic climate that may have suggested otherwise!

But lets look into this a little more. What search engines have proven to be the source of the sauce this season?

Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in November with 65.6 percent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo! Sites (17.5 percent), and Microsoft Sites (10.3 percent). Ask Network captured 3.8 percent of the search market, followed by AOL LLC with 2.8 percent.

Lets face it, people really do not know for certain, what people will actually do! Some said credit cards and wallets will be kept under lock and key this holiday, while others said expect a better spend than last year…… so how is it fending up?

For the holiday season-to-date, $15.3 billion has been spent online, marking a 4-percent increase versus the corresponding days last year. The most recent week saw three individual days eclipse $800 million in spending, led by Cyber Monday, with $887 million in spending, matching the heaviest online spending day on record. The following Tuesday nearly matched the Cyber Monday total with $886 million in spending, while Thursday, Dec. 3 reached $808 million in spending.