Over the past 10 years the escort industry has changed dramatically due to the Internet Revolution. Previously, escort agencies only advertising mechanism was through local or national newspapers, magazines and miniature advertisement cards placed in phone boxes. With the Internet Revolution it brought an entirely new way of advertising to potential punters, the birth of websites.

During the early years of the Internet, escort agencies had simple websites with a few images in a gallery and they were able to rank highly in search engine results pages due to low competition. As more and more escort agencies and independent escorts adopted the Internet as a means of advertising, ranking highly in the search engine results pages became increasingly difficult.

With the sophistication of search engine optimisation practices and Google, Yahoo and Bing increasing the complexity of the search engine ranking algorithms this has meant a increase in expenditure for all agency trying to obtain the prestigious top spot for the keywords they require. With the increased competition this is actually increasing the barriers of entry to the market as a agency just starting has to find quite a considerable amount of capital to build a functional and attractive website, develop and implement a search engine optimisation strategy and also attract escorts to work for them rather than the big competitors who can guarantee work.

A Chester escort agency owner said “I’ve been working in the escort industry for many years, even before we had a web presence. The Internet has given people within the industry the ability to target specific demographics of web users and has made the marketing and advertising methods more effective. I can reach a global audience and I have sent escorts as far as Dubai and Japan. This would have been unattainable before the Internet came along. I believe this has enabled to escort industry to grow vastly over the years. However with this growth the number of agencies competing has become fierce. Being at the top of escort directories and search engine results pages is absolutely essential to being successful along with having a mixture of escorts available to you.

I believe the Internet will take the escort industry even further in the future by utilising more of the technologies the porn industry is using. This is subscription based chat, video cams and virtual meetings. It’s definitely an exciting time within the industry and to remain competitive you need to stay ahead of the game.”

Evidentially as the escort industry becomes more sophisticated, search engine optimisation becomes more competitive this will result in higher barriers to entry for setting up a new agency, however this should result in only the most innovative and Internet savvy agencies surviving.