Many marketers face uncertainty when it comes to executing SEO during a recession or economic downturn and quickly realize a status-quo strategy won’t suffice. Given this, we recommend several focus areas for marketers to continue to drive performance and deliver business impact. One of those, SEO & SEM synergy, has existed as a general best practice for years. There are nuances, however, to times of economic downturn, that make the topic particularly critical for marketers to master now.
There are three major questions that require answers as search marketers operate in both SEO SEM during a downturn:
In challenging economic times, we see both negative impacts and positive opportunities for brands. Clearly, search demand can decline for both a specific brand as well as general industry interest. All competitors are chasing a smaller overall audience. Small competitive product differences can also become critical as customers become more discerning about purchases. Those impacts can be seen when SEO SEM conversion rates fall faster than traffic does, as it becomes tougher to convince customers to buy.
On the other hand, if competitors experience budget crunches, SEM costs may go down in certain spaces, yielding better potential ROI to advertising investments. Because gains during this time tend to come at the expense of competitors due to that smaller overall demand, smart SEO SEM strategies – executed well – can have an outsized performance impact when examined in the overall competitive context.
In today's competitive market, it's crucial for brands to optimize their online presence by leveraging the interconnected relationship between the two powerhouse channels - SEO and SEM. Working in harmony, these channels not only share the search results page but also the attention of your target audience. As savvy marketers, it's our mission to create a synergistic strategy that aligns with brand objectives.
With these disciplines focused on a common outcome, targeted focus areas come into view. While a downturn may force us to limit SEM spends or SEO focus in some areas, opportunities will emerge to focus joint attention in some areas and/or split focus in others.
For example, a category where SEO has ideal presence may be an opportunity to shift limited SEM spend elsewhere to ensure maximum possible incrementality, or vice versa. Or an area where competitive pullbacks have reduced SEM costs may be an “all-in” opportunity to focus SEM & SEO attention for maximum potential gains.
If we’ve oriented our SEO SEM strategy around common brand-impacting outcomes, we can start measuring success clearly based on those goals. Channel-specific metrics like SEO visibility or SEM CPC’s may be helpful leading indicators of performance, but we are reporting on common ultimate business goals of sales, revenue, etc.
Common goals also allow marketers to tell more effective stories during a downturn. While we might be challenged to tell a positive performance story when traffic and conversions are down, with a joint strategy, we can shift to tell stories about capitalizing on competitive openings, shifting focus areas to maximize limited investments, and hopefully capturing a bigger slice of that overall audience of consumers.
While operating SEO and SEM during a downturn certainly presents numerous and significant challenges for marketers, understanding impacts, formulating the right strategy, and measuring performance appropriately can change the downturn mindset to be opportunistic and better position a brand to capitalize when demand rebounds.
If you’d like to learn more about how to create impactful SEO & SEM synergy during an economic downturn, use the form on the website to contact one of our SEO experts.