Recent forecasts are unfortunately beginning to give us a sense of the sheer scale of the economic devastation that has already been caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. On a certain level, it might seem forgivable for a small business or charity to devote a bit less time, money and energy to its search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts for a while.
Of course, you’d probably expect our SEO marketing experts to urge you to keep pumping money into a campaign with us.
There are, though, very real reasons not to cut your SEO budget or lower your sights with regard to your hoped-for search rankings at this time. Here are just some of them.
SEO is inherently about the long game
Sure, talk about “it’s not the results now that matter – it’s those in months and years to come” is the kind of thing you might expect to hear from a struggling football manager.
But SEO really is an effort that requires sustained, longer-term engagement. Keeping with the football analogy, it’s not about buying one superstar player who you expect to transform your fortunes overnight. Instead, you need to build your brand’s search profile and associated traffic gradually over time, like a savvy manager fine-tuning his team.
It can take a while, even working with the most capable SEO marketing experts, to move your brand’s key landing pages from the third or second page of the search engine results pages (SERPs), to the first page and then the number one ranking.
Well-executed SEO over time, though, can give you sustained results that make a real difference to the all-round destiny of your brand. By contrast, failing to keep up with SEO during a recession could cause your business to fall back into a position from which it will struggle to recover even once the ‘good times’ do finally return.
You could therefore be paying for that period of lower commitment for a much longer time to come.
There’s more to SEO than you might think
One reason why slacking with your brand’s SEO at any time – never mind a time of recession – can be so costly, is because SEO is so comprehensive, stretching far beyond simply engaging, informative and relevant content, or even just a great user experience (UX).
After all, the work of SEO marketing experts also touches upon such aspects as routinely optimising a site to eke out every possible speed advantage, building high-quality inbound links to the site, and monitoring the various key performance indicators to figure out what other adjustments may be needed.
Act now and reap long-term benefits
When contemplating how and where your businesses uses SEO in the up-and-down months and years ahead, it’s important to ensure your marketing budget caters to both immediate and longer-term requirements.
While SEO broadly isn’t generally considered to produce instant results, common components of SEO – such as the right content – certainly can.
You might have noticed during the early days of the Coronavirus crisis, for example, that news websites largely supplanted traditional health websites in the search engine rankings for certain key Coronavirus-related queries. That was testament to such outlets’ efficiency at answering the common concerns that people had as the pandemic rapidly developed.
Good SEO is therefore an investment in both the present and the future of your brand – and both of those elements could scarcely be more crucial right now. It’s probably not a wise moment for anyone to aggressively cut SEO marketing spending.
For a more detailed discussion of how your brand’s online marketing efforts ought to evolve in response to the current ever-changing social and economic situation, you’re welcome to get in touch with PENNInk Productions’ SEO marketing experts, whether via email or by calling 020 8144 7931.
Edward Solomon has over 30 years’ experience in project management, technical education, computer networking, web design and development and is a Digital Business Consultant for PENNInk Productions Ltd.
