With a slight hint of financial backlash, businesses generally enter a survival mode where their revenue can cover expenses. And still, staying ahead of their competitors is always in their minds. If you run a business with solid basics, there are high chances of surviving a recession. However, regular efforts on all fronts are mandatory, especially in marketing. And in the digital aspect of marketing, SEO becomes a key factor for your business’s survival. But how does SEO work in your favor when times are challenging?

Cost-cutting is among the first things management opts for when sailing through an economic storm. And some of the apparent impacts of cost-cutting are reduced marketing expenses and layoffs. However, for marketing, SEO still remains a favorite choice to keep things on mainly because of its low-cost nature. So let’s see how SEO can help your business in the recession.

How does SEO work?

If done correctly, SEO or search engine optimization ranks your webpage high on a search engine result page (SERP). It is generally a long-term organic effort that subtly improves the online visibility of your website content.

There are three primary aspects of SEO where you need to make regular efforts to achieve desired goals. These are technical setup, content, and backlinks. Technical SEO ensures that your website meets the standards and guidelines of search engines. Posting regular content and optimizing it for search engines ensures the relevance of your website. And finally, back-linking provides links to your website from different web addresses.

Each of these factors contributes to improving website authenticity and, as a result, making your website or a webpage rank higher on the search results.

Recession – How and when?

In an economic cycle, the recession is a bound-to-happen stage that declines the rate of financial activities. With the covid pandemic and current political crises, the world is fronting an economic downturn that might lead to another recession. And believe it, no business would ever love to hear this.

Several tools for tracking recession and financial measures like Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Consumer Price Index (CPI), Stock Market, etc., indicate that the recession might be upon us sooner or later. However, this time, the expected scale of adversity may not be as severe as before.

No matter how much it costs, a recession will always upset businesses. And in such times, maintaining marketing expenses becomes tougher than usual. Therefore, SEO becomes a crucial marketing tool to save your company. Although, you must never stop SEO at any time in the first place.

How SEO can help your business in a recession

Now you know how does SEO work. And with the recession knocking at the door, there is no time to waste. So here are the top reasons how SEO can help your business in the recession and why you should start it now:

Affordability

Whenever the financial health of a business plunges, the first impact is on the marketing expenditure. And in such times, even organic tasks like SEO might look expensive. But if you compare them to your other marketing campaigns, SEO is a catch. Even with minimum expenses, a web page can significantly move ahead of its competitors, especially in localized markets. 

Optimized websites can reach a qualified audience via search engines as people continuously search for something. And the cost of optimizing (on-site) a website is relatively low compared to your single ad spend. Even for off-site optimization, you barely spend a penny on anything other than the cost of hiring a professional.

If you have optimized your website and it ranks higher on the SERP, the chances of earning qualified leads increase many times. And every single visit can be crucial in leading your business through the recession.

Flexibility

If you understand how does SEO work, you will realize that it is a must affair for growth regardless of the size of your company. SEO works around the keywords or phrases used on a search engine. It allows you to find valuable variations of popular keywords tailored to target your audience more efficiently. And it is equally helpful for both small and big companies to reach people in a specific area.

The flexibility offered with SEO practices allows you to reach a relevant audience that gives you a regular customer base. If you are able to utilize regional targeting well, the chances of surviving a recession increase many times. As recession hits small businesses the worst, local SEO plays a crucial role in targeting a more relevant audience.

Necessity

An online presence for a business is more important than any other form of marketing. Currently, about 60% of the world’s population uses the internet. So, it makes it possible to reach a vast population of potential customers from a single place. And at times when the world is drifting toward a recession, it’s never wise to stay away from it. 

But to reap the benefits of online presence, it’s essential to appear in front of your ideal customers at the right time. And to do so, your business may not be able to afford to spend excessive money on ads during recession-like scenarios. So, SEO becomes even more critical at such times. The most understated reason to use SEO is its necessity. Whether the market booms or plunges, SEO is mandatory to bring your business’s online identity in front of people at the right time.

Accountability

When a user types a query, a search engine’s job is to show relevant results. For that, search engines like Google encourage users to implement SEO principles. As a result, your webpages arrive at the top of the search results assuring users of the quality & relevance.

SEO lets search engines know of your existence & offerings and ranks your pages higher. At a time of recession, no person, including customers, wants to spend a single penny experimenting with new things. If your website ranks higher than your competitors, it brings accountability to them & there is a high chance that the target audience will pick you ahead of others. SEO practices are highly cost-effective for maintaining that accountability by helping your rank higher and attract more traffic to keep the revenue stable.

How to SEO?

For any online business, SEO is inevitable. But you must be wondering how does SEO work and what measures you need to take. Read on to find out. 

Research

Every marketing strategy begins with research. For SEO, you need to find the keywords people use while searching for offerings related to your business. A search query can be in any form. For example, if you run a fast-food restaurant in Chicago, you must appear in the SERP for “best fast-food restaurants in Chicago” or “top-10 fast-food restaurants near me to try,” etc. Once you find the potential keywords, the next step is optimizing your website and online content around those keywords. 

Optimization

Optimization simply means your online profiles reflect the most relevant content that search engines can find. It includes enriching web page titles, descriptions, and content with selected keywords and structuring the website per Google standards. It helps Google or other search engines to understand your website quickly and recommend it for top results.

Content Creation

Quality content creation is one of the most crucial aspects of SEO. It can be in any form, from blogs to articles to infographics or e-books. People read and share it. So, publishing any type of content with high research and accuracy is crucial. But whatever information it contains, make sure to add the selected keywords.

Content Promotion

Promotion is vital in bringing more engagement to your content than any other process. Several ways to do it include email marketing, social media promotions, and paid advertising. You can opt for or mix these ways to promote your content based on what works well for your business.

Monitoring

Finally, keep a professional track of your efforts and results to see what worked and what didn’t. You can use Google Analytics, a free tool with professional reporting. Just install it on your website to track the progress. 

Final word

In conclusion, we can say that SEO is a significant way to grow in standard times and survive the recession. It is no less than a necessity, and businesses must understand how does SEO work. Thorough research, quality content creation, website optimization, and efficient promotion can put your online credentials way ahead of your competitors. Moreover, it is the most accessible, efficient, and economical way to get more traffic & customers.

So why waste more time? Start your SEO practices today and notice the changes they bring to your business. To know more about how SEO can help your business in the recessionand optimize your buyer journey, contact us today.