2016 was another eventful year for the search marketing and digital marketing industries. The search engines such as Google, Yandex, and Baidu continue to change the algorithms as well as their advertising products. Social media companies are also changing. While the changes are good (in most cases) to the consumers and the businesses, many of them seem to be too complicated for the small businesses, and just helping the large sized businesses with lots of resources and the budget. Since I’ve seen the early years of the search marketing industry, when there were so many opportunities for the small businesses, I cannot help but to hope that something would change in near future to bring back the opportunities to them. I also feel that some of those changes are to have the site/business owners to do the work for the search engines. Is it really the site owners job to clean up the links, or to have certain code on pages…

At the same time, I’m aware that the businesses must change the way they think of the marketing. We’ve been using the search engines for 20 years, and the social media sites for 10+ years. If the search marketing and the social media strategies are still not incorporated into the company’s main marketing strategy and the planning, and are still piggy backing on the “traditional (off-line)” marketing department or – the worst case scenario – IT department, you need to come our of the cave. The digital marketing should have its own place in the company. I understand that the companies need to care for the shareholders, and therefore showing the growth quarterly is important, I hope they remember to invest in future beyond the next 3 months.

All in all, 2016 was a great year. I would like to thank all of AJPR’s clients and people, who helped me with the businesses. I wish you a Happy New Year. May 2017 bring you the happiness and the success.