Recession SEO

It is coming. There is nothing that is going to stop it other than national energy exploration and development, and that is going to take time, so it is going to come - don’t kid yourself into thinking that our government can, or WILL head it off, or that some democrat throwing money at it is going to help it. Too much money has already been thrown where it should not have been. It is coming, and we are going to have to deal with it, and your business is going to sink or swim based in large part on the marketing decisions that you make.

SEO is a critical web survival strategy for recession planning. It is cost effective, and it lasts when it is done right (done wrong, it has to be adjusted all the time to compensate for change, done right, it will be fairly stable and require only minor adjustments).

In planning to survive in a declining economy, you should do two things where SEO are concerned:

1. Assess where you are. This means assess your search engine positionings, and assess the on-page factors. It is absolutely critical that you assess for over-optimization, and make sure that your site is not harboring tactics which were acceptable two years ago, but which are now considered black hat - the presence of those could torpedo you overnight. Also assess to make sure that the logical and stable things have been done to your site where practical.
2. Plan for where you want to go. Implement a solid and reliable backlink campaign, content building campaign, and regular assessment plan. This will help you to adjust to changes in the market as the economic dynamics change.

Your target market is likely to shift. That may require some adjustment in your page targeting. Your competition may get more aggressive, and you may need to optimize a bit more than usual. Your competition may indulge in negative SEO tactics, which means you need to keep your site squeaky clean. Your product or service offerings may need to be adjusted for new market dynamics, or your marketing messages may need to be modified. Either one of those can result in a need for SEO adjustment.

SEO does NOT need to be expensive. It is one of the most cost effective things to do, because you get a variety of good results from each change you make, and while some ongoing adjustment and backlinking is needed, for the most part, you optimize the pages, and then let that optimization work for you for the next year or so, until it is time to tweak it. And when you tweak it, the foundation you built the first time is still there, you don’t have to do it all over again.

SEO is even more important during economic hard times. We’ll be experiencing a recession in a market environment that has never been experienced before, but we can see from the past the relationships to the current technologies, and make accurate assumptions about what is going to matter. And SEO is GOING to matter… a lot.