It had to happen, somebody had to link SEO and the global financial meltdown together so thought it should rather be me than someone more qualified to comment. Does it help that I was, actually still am an accountant?

So the United States and certain other countries will be bailing out some of the larger financial institutions by either buying up distressed assets or by lending more money into the banking system as some of the banks are too scared to lend to each other and the system is bunging up I think the highly leveraged finance deals and credit default swaps (CDS) still have to come out somewhere, just not sure where. You can read more great articles on CDS’s by those who do this for a living at Bankaholic on what is going on and where it is happening.

So while the US, UK and everywhere else appears to be melting, from my dealings with business in Australia both large and small, I feel there is a sense of we should be cutting costs, managing budgets, things are bad but nothing drastic from a business perspective has changed in certain sectors so its a tad confusing. I have also noticed a higher interest in SEO and discussions around how to reduce paid advertising.

If I were a Marketing Manager

I would want sure fire ways to bring customers seeking my product or service to my website to convert them or introduce them to my brand at the lowest possible cost.

  1. I would spend some time ensuring my paid search campaigns were highly focused, conversion based and delivering at a set cost per customer acquisition or transaction. Why mess with a formula that works and that could potentially deliver even a higher ROI as more folks potentially cut their marketing budgets
  2. If I were not already doing search engine optimisation (SEO), start researching the topic and find out just where my website ranks and how much work I would have to do to improve these rankings. I may be biased but getting a good understanding of the SEO basics and also more complex SEO concepts can be done by reading about search engine optimisation at Bruce Clay.
  3. Find a good SEO firm to partner with. SEO is a large and specialist topic with many traps. Keeping across all aspects is challenging and sometimes making SEO based decisions which will impact the site design or structure just wont fly or may be high risk unless a third party is involved.
  4. Start to introduce SEO to the organisation, especially at an executive level, across the marketing team and the IT team responsible for the website. Become an SEO evangelist, use your SEO partner to drive this across the organisation.
  5. Once you have a reasonable structure in place, start to build out the website to rank for broader, but related topics and focus on search engine visibility for relevant terms, while ensuring the investment in SEO will deliver returns in at the least the medium to long term.
  6. Check your traffic everyday. If you don’t have analytics software, use Google Analytics, its free and gives great data.

Executives are learning more everyday about search engine optimisation and in some larger organisations where the Internet is a key channel to market, we see SEO traffic becoming a KPI (key performance indicator) for these people. Making SEO a core practice for the organisation also has the potential to reduce your paid spend cost as site quality improves in the search engines eyes and usability and W3C compliance, all of which are ultimately good things for the website. So don’t get left behind, start getting smarter on SEO.