Should You Invest in SEO and Marketing During a Recession?

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Is Marketing During a Recession Worth It?
Over the course of the past few years, businesses of all types, sizes and descriptions have been forced to navigate uncharted waters as we make our way through a rapidly-changing, global economic downturn. Many business owners are looking for ways to cut costs in order to weather the storm intact, and the marketing budget makes for a tempting target in uncertain times.

But is it the right move to stop or start SEO during a recession? And, if you can only keep one, is advertising or SEO the better choice for your business needs?

Choosing the Right Option for Marketing During a Recession
In modern times, the internet is the most crucial arena for marketing almost any iceland phone number list business, product or service to consumers. There are a lot of different methods of delivery and strategies, but they tend to break down into two key categories: paid advertising, and organic traffic from search engine optimization (SEO).

Advertising is when you pay a fee to have your ad displayed on a search engine, website or social media feed, while SEO involves maximizing your online presence with optimized content, link building, and much more in order to increase your ranking and appear high up on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Benefits of marketing during a recession include:
Showing customers that your company is strong and stable
Capitalizing on long-term ROI post-recession
Better cost-benefit advantage from decreases in active competition
Build brand loyalty with existing customers
Opportunity to increase market share
SEO and advertising are both solid strategies, and in an ideal world, business owners could utilize both in tandem for the best possible results.

But when we're talking about advertising versus SEO during a recession, it's sometimes necessary to be more choosy about where to focus your marketing efforts.

That leads us to the question of whether it is better to stick with (or start) advertising or SEO during a recession period.

Advertising In a Recession
There are multiple ways to approach online advertising and different types of online advertising work best for different purposes. For example, Google Ads can be quite effective at getting clicks and leads from specific types of clients, because they can be targeted very precisely at your ideal customer or client.

They tend to have a relatively high conversion rate of around 18 to 20+ percent on average. Social media ads, on the other hand, tend to have a much lower conversion rate of only about 0.5 to two+ percent, but they're very effective at building awareness of your brand, which is a long-term strategy that can pay off slowly over time.

The factor that makes advertising in a recession a riskier choice is that it is only effective while you are actively paying for the ad to be displayed. If your advertising budget shrinks and you stop paying, naturally the ad will no longer be displayed—and any benefits you were getting from your marketing spend will stop immediately, which can make difficult times even worse.

Simultaneous or successive ads don't build on the success of the previous ads, so in terms of marketing tactics, it can feel like starting from scratch with every new ad.