What Does The Recession Mean For Search Engine Marketing?

Posted Wednesday 4th March 2009 by admin in SEM News.

The current economic climate has changed the face of marketing, with trends in many industries showing a return to core operational business systems. The resultant consequences are that organisations are downsizing projected growth over the short to mid-term to cut costs which is bad news for professionals in roles such as sales and marketing.

Industries which are worst affected such as the financial services industry have been making widespread redundancies in these aforementioned areas, leaving many sales and marketing professionals out of work. The elaborate marketing budgets of the last decade seem to be evaporating and return on investment is the new focus.

Despite the seemingly hostile economic environment there has been an overall growth in search engine marketing [SEM]. The growth has been maintained across the two main sections of SEM, paid and organic search, with CPC rates not showing any signs of receding and search engine agencies busier than ever for organic search; this was compounded by the healthy fourth quarter results for Google.

Due to the measurable ROI marketers are beginning to strategise with search engines in mind and many are choosing to outsource their SEM to third parties as opposed to training or recruiting in house. Although this might seem like good news in the short term for SEM agencies there are some projected pitfalls that could occur.

As paid search delivers faster results and is an extremely simple concept [every time a user clicks on an advert you pay a set amount for that click] it shows much more popularity with the corporate crowd. On the other hand, organic search is a gradual process which involves a certain degree of understanding about how search engines create results.

The nature of the two SEM disciplines create their own respective problems. The measurable nature of paid search sees companies piling in for competitive keywords, however the background search engine knowledge essential for organic search is not applied. This knowledge applied to keyword research can cut costs and raise traffic, something which many marketing departments do not take advantage of.

With more competition coming into the organic search marketplace there will be an increasing number of agencies looking to cut corners, which could have knock-on effects if search engines decide to tighten up in response. Shooting star SEO agencies could also give the industry a bad name by not delivering results which would call for some sort of industry self regulation specifically for SEM.

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