With another global recession looming ahead, many business owners are paying a closer attention than ever to their operational costs. For many of them, it is not about making a profit anymore, but breaking even. You stop offering generous discounts. Some employee benefits get the axe. Sadly, some businesses need to let go a part of their staff. And it’s time to look at the marketing and SEO costs. Wait – you should not go there! Although it may be tempting to keep other expenses, we will show you that you must keep doing SEO during a recession.
Unfortunately, many businesses do not perceive the material benefit of SEO. SEO is not a customer who walks in to make a purchase. Nor is it a clear percentage in your annual turnover. But the reality is that, without SEO, you would not have those customers walking in your store and contributing to you annual turnover.
Does SEO Still Work during a Recession?
When an economy slows down, it is visible at all levels, from government expenditure to every person’s shopping decisions. But nothing comes to a full stop. Consumers still need products and services. They continue to search for the best offer for children’s clothes and kitchen utensils.
They need groceries and even a smartphone if the old one breaks down. Plus, the economy is cyclical. We’ve had several recessions so far and every time the economy bounced back. So, what is the connexion between these facts and doing SEO during a recession?
The answer is simple: SEO is an ongoing effort with medium and long term effects. If you stop doing SEO during the bad times, you will lose growth opportunities when the good times come back.
Here Are Some Important Reasons to Keep Doing SEO during a Recession
Keeping in mind the ideas above, here is why SEO must remain a priority for a company even during an economic recession:
1. Reduced Competition
Here is the deal – while you keep doing SEO during a recession, your competitors may make the wrong decision to cut back these expenses. This means that your website will have higher chances of ranking higher for your relevant keywords.
In other words, doing SEO when everyone else stops actually gets you better results with less effort.
2. You Will Improve Your Brand Image
Once a recession is over, customers will remember the brands that kept posting useful, interesting and helpful content. They will also remember those who entered the radio silence zone – and penalise them.
As we explained several times before, people act in a reciprocal manner: you do something nice for me, I do something nice for you. Thus, if you keep doing SEO during a recession, then your customers will keep buying from you.
3. SEO Is Flexible
The reality is that you can keep doing SEO while scaling back your efforts a bit. You can focus on creating more affordable types of content. You can give up large scale marketing efforts and focus on local SEO – which is actually more effective during a recession.
Consumers are looking for products and services in their local area, for several reasons:
- Reducing shipping costs
- Encouraging local businesses
- Getting more sustainable products.
4. SEO Is Cost Effective
Compared to other digital marketing strategies, SEO has the best cost/benefit ratio. And, once you have a clear strategy in place, the effort is no longer financial, but more in terms of time to monitor the results and content creation – which you can start doing yourself if you want to save money.
There is no reason why you would stop doing SEO. There are so many affordable tools that help you automate SEO tasks, while you can focus on ways to keep customers happy.
5. Google Encourages Businesses to Keep Up Their SEO Efforts
Google remains the most popular search engine. And one of the things it looks for in a website is fresh content. This is a sign that someone is still in charge with the website and keeping its going.
Nobody wants to reach a site with stale content, where they are not sure if they will even get a reply to an email or a message sent using the online form. And Google knows that. For this reason, sites which are not updated frequently do not show up in the first pages of Google search results. And this is exactly what may happen to your site if you stop doing SEO during a recession.
Conclusion
The upcoming period will be challenging for everyone. Everyone will be looking more carefully at their expenses. But this does not mean that you should slash essential operational costs. SEO is one of these essential costs.
So, no matter how difficult it seems, find ways to save money in other ways, but keep doing SEO during a recession.