Entries Tagged 'budget' ↓

A little ditty I wrote, inspired by a recent blog by SEO mentor Rand Fishkin (I was lucky to be one of his trainees):

The economy’s down, around our knees, and sinking further still.

But through the doom and gloom of fiscal chill,

A cardinal rule holds true:

No matter if the banks and stocks should be more foe than friend,

To get consumers going forth… Marketing spends should never end.

The more so for the SEO, social media and paid search,

So don’t be cornered by hard times, or get left in the lurch -

Remember folks are Googling still - it’s Get Found Online or Die!

(Please excuse the bad poetry!)

Good thing I hung onto that One Million Three Hundred Twenty Nine Thousand Sixty Three dollar bill… Might be coming in handy with the looming doom of the economy crumbling around our ankles. Guess it gives new meaning to the expression of “having a little ‘mad money’ to spend”!!

Recession is traditionally a time to hunker down and survive as a company… but it can be a time to thrive instead - scooping up the customers of your competitors who go out of business.

A common mistake is to slash your marketing spend during tough times - precisely when you need to boost efforts to get found by prospects.

An SEO blog in Spain describes it thusly:

Many businesses have gone under due to killing their advertising budget at the most critical time, when all the smarter businesses knew that far from reducing advertising and marketing spend, it should be increased… This will be the first time [in a recession] this is applicable with SEO as the subject, but as Search advertising and marketing have to a large extent bitten very deeply into traditional advertising formats, Radio, TV & The Printed Media… we can safely assume that the SEO-savvy businesses can apply the same logic to SEO in this recession.

You definitely cannot afford to sit back and hope that prospects find you online; word-of-mouth is only going to get you so far in these tough economic times.

You need every single dollar you spend on marketing right now to get you great results in lead generation. Nice thing about SEO services - they’ll give you ROI with a rocket launcher.

As much as I like to bill clients extra fees, I also shudder when I know perfectly well - and have told the client - that the extra cost is unnecessary.

Let me elaborate: I tell a client, “let’s do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) from the very concept of design right through to site launch and well beyond.”

The client says they don’t have enough money to do SEO now; “let’s just put up a nice-looking site.”

The client comes back to me, a few months later and says, “we aren’t getting found online; can you go back in and change the site so it meets SEO requirements?” [Read: restructure/redesign, conduct keyword research, rewrite all the content.]

Pay now or pay (more) later

We comply, and suggest they invest in ongoing SEO work, on a monthly basis, to keep the rankings high by hiring us to build links, add fresh content regularly, and tweak keywords.

The client tells us, no thanks, we don’t have the money for ongoing SEO work.

A short while later, their site is dropping out of page one in Google; they want us to scramble and play catch up by building links, etc.

Same end result - but late to the party

They end up having the Search Engine Optimized site that we suggested from the start - only they lost valuable time (competitors moving up the page rankings ahead of them) and spent extra, unnecessary fees getting there!

SEO is a time-consuming enough process when it’s done right (i.e. well planned and integrated with short and long-term business objectives).

When it’s done wrong - patching together a site with disparate additions like some kind of e-Frankenstein - SEO project time mounts. My time is money… your money.

Hmmm… maybe that longer-term, organic SEO strategy isn’t looking like such a bad idea after all!