Does Increasing Online Advertising Of Seo Spend Make Sense During A Recession?
When a recession hits just about every company is going to feel the effect of it to an extent, although it can vary wildly depending on the industry. One thing that tends to remain constant in a credit crunch is that larger companies find it easier to weather the storm, while smaller businesses are put at a much greater risk.
One of the first things many businesses will do during a recession is to cut their advertising spend. It’s often a knee jerk reaction aimed at saving costs in the short term. During a standard recession, the first thing that’s usually affected is the offline advertising spend, and that has held true during the current credit crunch.
However, recent studies have shown that spending for online advertising increases. Why do people so quickly abandon print media and put their faith in online methods during a recession?
The Importance of ROI
Methods that can achieve a measurable Return on Investment is something that many companies will turn to when money is tight, which can explain why easily scalable and measurable online campaigns where every click and sale can be tracked in real time are so appealing.
Print advertising can be powerful and is arguably better at achieving long term goals such as brand awareness, but the actual financial returns can be difficult to measure and take much longer to appear on a balance sheet. In contrast, an online campaign can see results in a matter of days, making for a short term but much more controlled advertising investment.
Advertising Budget or Cost of Sale
There’s some debate about whether some forms of online advertising should be included in a marketing budget at all and that the methods used should instead be labelled as ‘Cost of Sale’.
The reasoning behind this logic comes from recent surveys that suggest a huge number of people don’t look beyond the first page of results when searching for products and services through Google. A survey from iProspect in 2009 suggested that as many as 68% of all internet users won’t move beyond the top ten results in a search engine.
Of course, this means that unless you happen to be appearing on the first page for your keyterms, you are missing out on over two thirds of your potential traffic. In turn, this means that getting your page on that top level of results will mean you are nearly guaranteed to increase sales by a large amount.
Moving towards quicker returns rather than long term brand awareness campaigns makes sense during a recession. Online advertising and increased interest in getting good rankings in Google can be a more powerful tool than print media simply because those finding your website in Google have already been searching for something related to your business – not just casual readers of a newspaper or magazine.
There are plenty of different forms of online marketing, however. Let’s take a look at three of the most popular sub divisions.
Pay Per Click
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising can be effective when targeted correctly, but it’s also expensive and has the potential to fail miserably if careful research is not done beforehand. The most popular form of PPC uses the absolutely massive network of Google Adwords.
The bonus of PPC is that you only pay when a user clicks on an advert rather than paying simply to display that advert to thousands of uninterested users. It’s also less likely to get blocked out by a users filtering software.
PPC works best on sites that sell products that are considered low risk or impulse buys. The method may give quick returns but is a risky proposal for many small businesses and can be incredibly costly in the long term.
Banner Adverts
During the early days of the internet boom when users were first coming online, banner adverts were one of the most popular ways to send advertising to consumers.
However, in the last few years the effectiveness of the banner advert has been greatly reduced. People have learned to subliminally filter out the banner adverts as spam, while several different programs available can even physically block out adverts completely from a site.
There is simply not enough interest and click through for banner adverts to make a sustained campaign worth the investment.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a huge area, and despite its importance it’s one that many companies are often wary of. This is normally due to lack of knowledge about the benefits or potential ROI from a good, ethical SEO campaign.
However, if the right company is chosen and the business ensures that the company produces their results using ethical SEO methods, then an SEO campaign can be hugely successful. Finding an ethical company is by far the most important element however. Unfortunately some SEO companies will simply try to employ a one size fits all tactic to your company that will give you poor results or worse use methods that could see you being penalised heavily by Google.
SEO can take longer than a PPC campaign to see a result, but over the space of just a few months many companies experience a large influx of traffic. Even better, this traffic is often targeted as it’s coming directly from search results on your chosen topics. Ten hits on your site from people looking for your product are better than one hundred random hits that have no interest in your services at all.
Used well, SEO can give you a much better and long term ROI solution than PPC advertising, as you’ll website will be placed directly in front of people searching for your keyterms. This is ultimately a lot more effective than traditional methods of advertising online and can be a lot cheaper in the long term, too.
Kingpin-seo are an ethical SEO agency based in the UK. They use a broad range of techniques from traditional to cutting edge to acheive their clients’ SEO goals.
