A recent survey shows that business owners and managers reflect the importance of maintaining your SEO efforts through the coming downturn while scaling back paid advertising. The survey of industries included business to business (24%), retail (12%), healthcare (11%), media (10%) and others (travel and hospitality, consumer technology, financial services, insurance, automotive, e-commerce and manufacturing).

Owners/managers anticipate reduced online budgets, but with campaign goals being the same or up. They indicated that their online marketing budgets are being impacted by the economic downturn. However, the majority of the survey respondents indicated that their budgets were only decreasing slightly or remaining the same. Only 20% were implementing large decreases in marketing, indicating the need to maintain a strong organic ranking position when the economy recovers.

SEO is a “race with no finish line” over time as businesses continually jockey for top page one positions with the search engines, particularly Google.  The majority of survey participants anticipate that their marketing goals would be more difficult to reach this year. Over 60% felt that SEO would be more important due to the economic downturn. Only 5% indicated that SEO would be less important.

Linking, particularly backlinking, is all the rage with the SEO blogs and newsgroups today. And, there is no doubt that linking is extremely important to SE. However, linking is not the central issue. If the page being evaluated by the search engine robots does not rank high for the keyword phrase being evaluated, the page is going to be downgraded substantially. Effective SEO must begin with building pages that rank high for keyword phrase content. And, it’s common sense: the search engines are programmed to help people find the information that they’re searching for. Most people don’t go to business websites to be entertained by animation, streaming media, or flashy graphics. They make the first visit, along with return visits, because they expect to find information, products, or services that they want and need.
Continue reading “CONTENT IS KING: The Often Overlooked Front End of SEO”