Businesses Are Hurting and Cutting Marketing Budgets
The point of this post is the current economic recession (lets call it what it is) and more importantly discussion on the first thing that most businesses cut during a downturn in business or the economy, their marketing budgets. While experts agree increasing marketing is usually key to stemming the tide, it is still the first place most companies start the cut. As a search engine optimization consultant this can mean a direct impact on your ability to gain new clientele. Frankly put companies are losing money, firing employees, and combine Wednesday and Thursday of the first week of November and you get the Dow dropping a whopping total of 929 points!

Defining how you, as a marketing specialist, survives this recession is key to your ability to help your clients do the same through this rough economic time.

White Hat SEO’s Turning To Spam For Clients
This brings me to something I’ve been noticing a LOT of recently. On just about all of my sites, even ones I would consider “Hub” sites that rank very well, I have been receiving a daily barrage of new Spam. However this time its from SEO companies, some that are known and even pretty active in the “SEO” community. I am use to being blasted by the rogue SEO “companies” (that term used VERY loosely) based in India and abroad, but this new slew of US based companies made me really start to think about the future of the SEO world as a whole. How will the down turn the past couple of years in the amount of consumers seeking search engine marketing interact with the recent economic position?

Google Trends

The House Cleaning of the Search Engine Optimization Industry
Our industry as a whole is starting to go through a bit of a “House Cleaning” similar to what the real estate industry has experienced the past few years. Four years ago just about everyone went into real estate as an agent or a loan officer. The market was red hot and people could literally jump right in and start making money. Well, with the housing market taking it’s beating (read: complete obliteration) recently those thousands of real estate agents and loan officers are now out of business and making up a large percentage of the jobless Americans. (Though those with high ranking websites appear to be stemming the tide a bit better just from the shear amount of traffic they receive). The same thing is coming down the line for SEO companies.

Cut Rate May Be Cutting Out

The biggest “cleaning” I feel will be in the cut rate, primarily spam oriented, “Guaranteed Google rankings for $29 a month” type of companies. If you sell search engine optimization or search engine marketing services than you are well aware of these firms. You may even have had to try to “defend” your pricing structure against these kinds of sites. It’s frustrating, especially when the buying public as a whole does not understand the industry and what it entails (read: time and money) to achieve ranking. This really becomes evident in heavily optimized industries such as real estate. It amazes me personally when I see companies offering those kinds of pricing and services since I know there is no benefit to their service. But how do you get that across to potential clients?

Information and Education. Simply put the SEO companies that are going to survive the down turn are going to be the ones that not only can give their clients information and an education of sorts on the world of search engine optimization, but also those companies constantly working to stay a step ahead, working on new content, seeing trends before they happen and constantly working to gain more and more knowledge. The cutting edge can only be the cutting edge when the edge is kept sharp.