The Best SEO Tactics To Use During A Recession

Simple and effective strategies to leverage in a tough economy

The last several years has brought a pandemic that caused a shortage of consumer good and materials, we’ve experienced multiple elections and crazy weather anomalies. On top of that Google has made quality SEO even more important because of the bevy of major algorithm updates in 2022 than they have in quite some time.

Consumer search interests simultaneously swapped from an decrease in “near me” type searches to an increase an “how to” and “DIY” searches at the start of the pandemic. When focusing on the red line, we can see the surge of “how to” type searches that represent the uptick in DIY type search intent. Consumers were more focused on keeping people away from their homes and becoming more self reliant. The redline has remained consistent until the start of the pandemic where it sharply rises. The blue line representing “near me” searches show that over the next 12 months consumers slowly started to increase search for transactional type searches, dropping off sharply again in Q1 of 2022.

5 Proven SEO Techniques To Implement During A Recession

The job of an SEO is not to make more people search for your product, brand or service it’s to make sure your website appears when they do. According to the state of SEO report done by SEL, businesses who value SEO will increase their spend in 2023 after already increasing it in 2022 while those who do not are expected to cut budget in 2023.

Align Your Messaging

Are you going to market your most premium products and services in high end markets or are you going to market your most cost-effective products and services to price-conscious consumers? Ideally, both, however many marketing teams are forced to choose due to budget constraints. This decision goes beyond the SEO team alone, collaborate with sales, finance, and paid search to collect as many data points as possible to make this decision

Improve your CTR (Click Through Rate)

Often times SEO strategies focus on keyword expansion and improving average position, this is an impactful strategy and one to be encouraged. What if you could maintain your current top rankings yet generate another 20% more clicks? This is possible by focusing on your click through rate. When you log into Google Search Console you will be presented with your site’s CTR as a benchmark. Anything below your site’s CTR’s average can be improved upon.

Different ways you can view CTR

• By URL
• By Query
• Using Regex

A smart way to do this would be by separating out your branded and non-branded CTR. From there you can sort by URL to determine which pages Google is viewing your site as relevant and which ones Google is not. Simply increasing your CTR by .1% can result in thousands of more clicks (based on your impressions).

Increase your SoV (Share of Voice)

Really tough economies impact the SEO of businesses who own the highest percentage of share of voice because they have nowhere to go but down. The top businesses will still have the largest piece of the pie but they will also be hit the hardest when it comes to year over year growth.

When you have opportunity to improve your keyword positioning for highly competitive terms you still have a chance to maintain or even exceed your previous years goals by eating into the competitors share of voice.

Focus on building E-E-A-T

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness are things your SEO strategy should always be focusing on but when search demand is at its scarcest you will really want your website to appear consistent near the top of the search results.

Improving your website’s E-A-T will help ensure that you are positioning your website in the best possible way when those searches do happen.

One way to do this is by avoiding purchasing backlinks. Although tempting, it’s important to understand buying “guest blogs” from websites with high domain authority are generally not a good idea and could lead to severe penalties including having your site removed from the search engines.

Convert More Efficiently (Focus on CRO)

What parts of your website generate your conversions?

When you’re looking at Google Analytics or Hubspot analytics are you noticing your leads all come from certain sections of your website? Often times websites convert really well on the homepage, product or service pages, and testimonial pages but not their blog pages which account for a majority of their traffic.

If this is the case, you need to understand and emphasize conversions happening on these pages with scarce leads.

Not every conversion is the same for example: a service page might be a direct request for a quote or demo and a product page might have an actual sales transaction but a blog conversion might be an email capture for a newsletter and drip marketing.

Not every conversion will be created equal, but every lead counts!

Don’t let uncertainty guarantee your competition success!

In a tough economy it’s natural to be nervous about your 2023 SEO goals but if you focus on these proven enterprise SEO techniques even 2023 can be a successful year for SEO.

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