SEO strategies for small clients in a recession

Recession marketing. That’s an expression many of us will become very familiar with through the next few months.

I recently drove by some small stores I have occasionally visited over the past year and to my disappointment I found their buildings were vacant. The American news media reported last week that more than 4 million people are now collecting unemployment benefits (more than any year since 1982). Economists are predicting that unemployment will reach 8% in 2009.

That’s a lot of jobs in many industries that no longer exist. The economic downturn does more than just put people out of work: it puts many small enterprises out of business. Advertisers began cranking up their recession marketing rhetoric in 2007 and early 2008. Search engine optimizers are only just starting to jump on the bandwagon.

Not every small business can leverage Internet marketing to improve its bottom line, but today it’s more important than ever that small businesses not only maintain online visibility, they need to leverage that online visibility to produce as many sales as possible.

For existing SEO clients who may be suffering sales downturns, now is the time to present creative alternative marketing targets. They may be able to explore new keywords, either where competition has vanished or (more likely) where competition has yet to appear. Recession marketing in search engine optimization has to focus on eliminating competitive stress wherever possible, because clients may be giving serious consideration to reducing their search marketing spend.

If you can help your clients find monetizable but relatively uncompetitive queries, their return on investment will keep your relationship going. In other words, if you can show your client they make a profit when just comparing the cost of your service to the revenue it produces, they should be able to justify the expense. Recession marketing for search optimization needs to sell the idea that SEO which pays for itself is essentially a zero-cost marketing effort — not exactly free SEO service, but just as good.

Creating more content during a recession helps consumers find new, more relevant copy that touches on their feelings. Last year’s “good times are rolling” copy doesn’t work in this environment. People want to know they will either save money they MUST spend or that they may actually get something more than just the product or service they have to buy. This is what effective search engine optimization is designed to do.

Luxury products often do well in recessions. One marketer noted earlier this year that, “…If you are on a plane, and the plane is about to crash, you don’t drink piss…”. Small businesses that offer distinctive high-end merchandise may find the market for that merchandise is stronger than the market for less expensive merchandise.

It costs very little to write a blog post, set up a sales page, or otherwise write some new copy that addresses the current economic situation. It may cost an entire business its existence to assume that the Internet offers little to no hope of surviving the situation.

Search engine optimization offers a unique opportunity for people to learn what their potential customers are searching for relatively quickly. Today’s SEO resources did not exist during the last economic downturn (which ended about 6 years ago). There was really no basis for talking about recession marketing in SEO 6 years ago. Some search optimizers did very well at the time, but the situation was very different.

Recession marketing helps small, independent brands break away from the pack and come out from under the shadow of larger, well-established brands. The large brands will be emphasizing “brand equity” but smaller brands have an opportunity to outshine their cost-conscious competitors.

Small businesses that have leaner structures may not feel the bite of recession as much as large businesses. If a small business does not have to cut costs during recession, it may be able to grow its sales by capturing some of the larger competitors’ dissatisfied market share. The old “their customer service sucks compared to ours” approach has worked in past recessions and there is every reason to believe that good customer service will work in this recession.

Search engine optimization can help reach people who are dissatisfied with their current level of service and who are actively seeking alternatives. After all, plenty of research has shown that consumers perform multiple searches before making purchase decisions. Now is the time for businesses that need to grow to reach out to potential new clients with customer service initiatives that cannot be matched by large, publicly-traded companies whose only means of maintaining shareholder value is to cut payroll.

Search engine optimization doesn’t have to be expensive. It just needs to be effective. The fastest, most cost-effective way to create search visibility is to produce copy — copy that is relevant to current economic priorities will work better than older copy that was written for a larger workforce with more discretionary income.

But search engine optimizers should keep the comforting sales pitches out of the search results. People want to cut to the chase when they are picking sites to click through to. The “we’re here for your in this time of need” language needs to be found on the pitch page, not in the search listings. People will be more skeptical about what they see in search results now, so we need to tailor the search results to reassure them with straight-forward information, unencumbered with the hyperbole that marketers are so capable of constructing.

Now is not the time to clutter up indexable Web copy with nonsense. Rather, now is the time to write lean, mean, converting copy that matches the mood of the somber times with a hopeful contrast that is believable, informative, and unobtrusive.