2022 has been difficult for businesses, people and the economy.
This is especially true in the UK. The Cost Of Living Crisis has hugely affected how people are shopping and how companies market their products, with many businesses slashing their budgets for paid advertising.
During a rescission, it’s important to be strategic with your digital marketing efforts in order to maintain appeal to customers and potential clients. SEO can help by promoting organic growth and helping to make your business the first one your target audience sees when they go online.
Now is the time for start-ups and businesses with big ideas to take advantage of their biggest rivals cutting their marketing budgets. Here’s how investing in SEO during a recession can help you:
SEO Helps You Keep Up With Competitors
With fewer customers and lower spending potential, during a recession companies must ensure shoppers pick them over competitors. It may seem convincing to cut down on marketing costs by doing less SEO, but this could be a huge setback for your business. Cutting SEO could mean a drop in ranking, visibility, traffic, and, as a result, your revenue.
A SEO competitor analysis can help you pinpoint where you can use a limited budget best to beat out the competition. For example, if the analysis finds that your key competitors all have websites that load much faster than yours, your SEO team would know that technical optimisation is the most important area to focus on to increase conversion rates and ranking on search engines.
Likewise, if they find that your competitors have a large variety of content which is helping them rank for keywords your target demographic are searching for, you would know to invest more in content writing for your site.
Working with a dedicated SEO Agency like Boyd Digital can help you pinpoint areas that are worth your investment, backed up by data-driven research and analytics.
We can help you grow a long-term method of marketing that will keep you competitive, and prevent you from investing in areas which won’t benefit from development in your specific business landscape.
SEO Offers Sustainable Marketing
When you hire an SEO agency to help you with your SEO, they’ll ensure that new pages, blog posts and product or service descriptions are optimised for as long as you need them.
While it may be tempting to invest your funds in traditional marketing techniques such as billboards or posters, people will only view these for short periods of time and will have little time to take in the information. With an optimised website, people will easily be able to browse your content at their pace, finding answers to the questions they have about your product or service.
Optimising the content on your website to give you better sustainable visibility is what we call ‘Organic SEO‘. It helps you maintain a higher ranking in search engines such as Google, ensuring that potential customers easily find your business. 75% of people do not go past the first page of search engines, so for higher visibility, it’s incredibly important to have strong content which keeps people interested in your site.
Similarly, Technical SEO can help you in the long term by improving your website’s health and user experience. This will encourage people to spend longer looking at your services and help them easily navigate the page. It can also help drive down customer acquisition costs and grow your rankings.
Case Study: Glen Garioch Whisky
Glen Garioch Whisky had a number of goals for their business, including:
- Increase their page traffic.
- Rank better on search engines.
- Increase their online exposure and brand awareness by ranking their whisky products in search results ahead of the big supermarket chains and online off licences.
- Better their website for user experience.
After running an SEO Audit, the expert team at Boyd were able to assess the strengths and weaknesses of Glen Garioch’s content and technical functions. This allowed us to draw up a strategic SEO content plan to help them rank better in the search engine results.
The results showed a 90% increase in organic page traffic, 90 new indexed pages and 90 new social shares.
Get in touch with us today to learn how we can help your business grow its online presence through SEO optimisation.
SEO Helps Improve Conversion Rates
People are more careful with their money during a recession; e-commerce shoppers may be put off spending with your business if the user experience is difficult to navigate, or if your site is hidden away in search engines.
Technical SEO focuses on making a site accessible to both customers and search engines for the purpose of improved rankings. This includes analysing improvements in the way your site works and how it can be made as accessible as possible for users to navigate.
Insights show that 53% of mobile site visitors will exit a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Googles ‘Core Web Vitals’ will take this into account when choosing where to rank your webpage, dropping pages with long loading times further down the ranks – losing potential customers and lowering conversion rates.
SEO page speed optimisation can ensure this doesn’t happen, optimising your page to maintain quality whilst being quick to load and process customer demands so they go through with their order.
Case Study: UK Travel Agent
To explore how SEO helps you increase conversion rates, let’s take a look at our work with UK Travel Agent – the largest independent travel supplier in the UK.
After analysing the analytics for UK Travel Agent, the Boyd Digital team determined that the best route to achieve their goal of attracting more customers was to increase the conversion rate while creating content strategies based on holidays departing from UK Airports.
We successfully reduced the steps to book a holiday from 13 to 5, making the user experience easier for the businesses customers. This resulted in the conversation rate growing by 1.2 in the busy periods returning £1.3 million in new revenue for the client.
The overall results also included a 60% increase in bookings, a -22% reduction in bounce rate and a 55% increase in online revenue.
Speak to Boyd Digital about planning an expert Technical SEO strategy, and improving your conversion rates today.
SEO Helps Create Content Consumers Want To See
How language is used in sales is especially important during a period when people are making careful choices about where to spend their money.
People may want to avoid hearing terms such as ‘luxury’, ‘expensive feel’ and other terms which imply a high cost. Instead, they want to hear aspirational terms such as that something is ‘great value for money’ or ‘eco-friendly’ and ‘long-lasting’. These are more likely the terms that they’ll search for.
One of the brilliant things about SEO is that it’s flexible enough to consider all of these when producing content for your website. A professional SEO agency such as Boyd Digital can create a range of content that focuses on the key terms people use when they search and update this regularly to keep up with the trends.
Using expert keyword research software, Boyd Digital can see when a term becomes outdated, and our experienced content writers can ensure that people still find your product or service by updating everything from product descriptions to landing pages.
We are also able to keep up with changes to the Google content guidelines, such as the recent Google ‘Helpful Content’ update. Ensuring that your content falls within these guidelines is vital to your success with search engine rankings, as Google flags content that does not contain valuable, original, relevant information as untrustworthy. Boyd Digital can help you maintain a high ranking by keeping your content relevant and reliable for audiences.
Take a look at some further case studies of how we’ve helped companies like yours grow their digital presence with a strategic SEO plan.
Closing Thoughts,
At Boyd Digital, we understand that making any business or marketing investment during a recession can feel like a huge decision.
SEO offers a strategic, long-lasting service which can help you keep your content and webpage current for consumer needs and demands. When you work with Boyd Digital, we can help you with every aspect of your digital optimisation, including:
- E-commerce SEO
- Social Media Marketing
- Pay-Per-Click Management
- Digital Audits
- Competitor Analysis
- Website Performance Optimisation
If you’re interested in finding out more, get in touch with us for a consultation. We’d be happy to discuss your business goals and how our SEO services can help you reach them.