When the economy fluctuates and consumer spending stifles, you as a business owner will naturally tighten your budget to save dwindling revenue. However, by cutting back on important marketing strategies such as continuous SEO branding, you may hamper your financial stability in the long run. MyCity Social, an Orlando SEO Agency, wants to remind you that your SEO efforts work best when maintained throughout an economic recession. Recovering from a recession without active SEO is easier said than done.
SEO Branding Is Not Dispensable
Don’t underestimate the impact your marketing has on your profits. By eliminating key players in your digital marketing game, you will maim your abilities to reach consumers, boost your brand, and drive revenue. To state it simply, you cannot gain more input while giving less output. Yet, business owners, in the wake of the pandemic and their own struggling finances, are tempted to make cuts to their digital marketing platforms such as paid and organic search. While your business is remote, temporarily shut down, or in quarantine, you may elect to skip the hefty fee for your pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements. However, by “going dark” and removing PPC ads, your company may give the impression of having closed permanently. Previous customers may notice your marketing absence and surmise that you have left the market. Similarly, if you usually outsource your organic search to an SEO agency, you may be tempted to pull the plug while revenue is down. However, by doing so, you will lose opportunities to groom customers in search of your product or new to the digital marketplace. Either way, your SEO tools are indispensable, and laying them aside will cost your business more harm than help.
Let’s review the essential tools in your marketing bag: paid search results and organic search results. The main difference between these two implements is the way they are run. Paid search is automatically generated, while an organic search is manually optimized by the business owner or an Orlando SEO agency. A marketing campaign that focuses on paid search results will prioritize keeping their brand a top result in search engines such as Google. This is accomplished through SEO practice: namely, keyword optimization. Investing in strategic paid search ads is smart but can become expensive and produce diminishing returns as time goes on. Organic search, on the other hand, lives and breathes with the searches of the day. Although you will need to constantly optimize your organic search content, the results will bring you a wider presence online and a bigger impact on your customer base.
A common illustration used throughout marketing is the “sales funnel,” through which a customer progresses from product unawareness to product purchase. If you need to boost awareness of your product, seek consumers at the wider part of the funnel – those who are unfamiliar with your product’s value but open to learning more. Awareness campaigns thrive in social marketing: advertisements on social media pages, for example. With curated content for a newsfeed or timeline, social media contextualized your product to the consumer’s everyday situation. By contrast, paid search advertisements rarely reach the consumers at the top of the sales funnel. Unless the consumer intentionally searches the keywords you have chosen for your product, they are unlikely to see your ad. Instead, paid search advertisements rake in revenue for consumers in the lower part of the funnel – those ready for an imminent purchase. Thus, both organic search and paid search are valuable tools in your marketing bag; they simply target different types of potential customers and require different types of strategies.
The Consequences Of Halting Your Paid Or Organic Search
Both paid search and organic search drives traffic to your site. The return on your paid search investment exhibits quite literally a binary relationship: if you’ve paid for the advertisement, the advertisement will bring you traffic. As long as the ad is “on,” your results are “on.” Switching paid search “off” for a time will correspond with a stark drop-off in traffic, while resuming your paid search will quickly rejuvenate site traffic. This one-to-one correspondence between effort and result differs from what you would experience with a hiatus from organic search. Results from organic search take time to accumulate, building your brand slowly but impactfully. If you decide to remove your organic search campaign, the efforts you had previously put in will continue to generate traffic, eventually slowing to a trickle. Conversely, resuming organic search will engender a slow building of momentum towards the traffic you had at your peak time. In sum, a cease in paid search advertisements brings a severe drop-off, while a cease in organic search advertisements bears a lag; similarly, resuming paid search ads will bring traffic to your site nearly instantaneously, while the results from resuming organic search ads will take longer to show up. This lag may take weeks or months to close the gap between where your site’s traffic was at its peak and where it is now.
Maintaining a healthy use of organic search ads in your marketing campaign is similar to staying in shape. For instance, if you wanted to make progress toward your fitness goals and improve your health, you wouldn’t expect to attain peak fitness overnight. Your fitness campaign would be effortful, intentional, and far-sighted in order to produce quality results. However, being in shape is not a one-time achievement; you must maintain your fitness routine in order to stay in shape. If you get lazy and shirk your lifting schedule for a couple of weeks, you will still retain muscle mass for a while after your last workout. Over time, however, you will lose the progress you had made and end up with the couch potato body that prompted your campaign in the first place. An organic search campaign works the same way. The windfall from a successful organic search strategy will provide returns even after you’ve ceased your organic search content. Eventually, though, the returns will dry up, and you will lose the momentum. Just like stopping and starting a train, restarting a halted organic search takes more effort than the savings are worth.
What To Do Instead Of Ceasing SEO
Since pulling the plug on your paid and organic search campaigns is unwise in the long run, what should you do to save your business in the wake of an economic recession? In order to guarantee that there will be a market for you when you’re fully up and running, endeavor to at least maintain a “pulse.” Keep the lights on. Communicate with your customer base regularly throughout your shutdown, even if the quality of your communication is substandard or less frequent than normal. Keep your customers informed on your temporary changes and the opportunities they may have to support you. Secondly, be honest about the health of your business in this pandemic. There is no shame in admitting that sales have dropped and your company is struggling to stay afloat. You may find that your community is eager to support you if they know you need the help. Convince them you are worth supporting by publically implementing effective safety protocol. Don’t skimp on personal protective equipment, social distancing measures, or contactless sales options for your customers. If they can trust you to take their health seriously, they will be more likely to give you a chance.
Finally, be creative with the offerings you can provide during this time; find a niche in your business that is both relevant to the pandemic and needed during the shutdown. Perhaps you own an apparel company that manufactures trendy, handmade boutique clothing. With fewer to no shoppers at your brick-and-mortar store, you can transfer your assets easily into mask design and manufacture, which has been in high demand throughout the pandemic and will continue to thrive until mask mandates end. Trying something new may feel reckless, but it’s not about experimenting – it’s about adapting. Test the market and see what people are buying and what they’re not. Evaluate your resources and look for ways you can capitalize off the demand currently running the market – instead of waiting for it to swing back in your favor.
Don’t disappear out of advertising. Keep your paid and organic search going in order to continue reaching customers. Don’t shutter your store without communicating your strategy. Find ways to stay in business, even if it looks different from your usual fare. Finally, stay safe. Emerge from the shutdown with new business strategies, new customers, and a stronger SEO because of it.
Contact Us
If you’re unsure how to maintain good SEO branding on your own, contact our Orlando SEO Agency at MyCity Social. We can improve your paid and organic search to optimize site traffic and drive product sales.
