3 months to recession and counting

It will, it would seem, take another three months for the Bank of England to confirm what is entirely apparent to anyone with the vaguest interest in the economy: we’re in a recession. Not officially of course; we can’t officially be in a recession until we’ve endured two quarters of negative growth (whatever that is).

Which means that currently we’re halfway to recession. We’re dipping our toe in the murky waters of economic shrinkage with three months left to decide whether we wish to dive in.

The truth is, of course that we dived in some months ago and the evidence is only now becoming apparent – and for the leaders of any business that means tough decisions, tightening belts when they were already feeling pretty tight, and cutting back on any non-essential expenditure.

Last month I wrote that when ‘non-essentials’ are cut back it’s always the advertising budget that feels the brunt of the budgetary massacre. For those of us who own or run web businesses the temptation is always there to reduce expenditure on search engine optimisation – especially since you’re unlikely to notice much of a difference to your rankings in the first few days.

Abandon search engine optimisation (SEO) for any longer than that, though, and you will have to endure the depressing sight of watching your rankings start to slide for every key word on every search engine.

It may take weeks, perhaps even months for the effect to become so dramatic that your visitor numbers start to slide but the message couldn’t be clearer: cut the optimisation budget and you cut off the customer supply. They won’t be able to find your website amongst the millions elsewhere clamouring for business that could and should have been yours.

Search Engine Optimisation: everyone, everywhere, anytime.

So when advertising and marketing budgets bite the dust, remember to carefully remove search engine optimisation form the list of budgetary casualties.

If you don’t advertise in the local paper you’ll save a few hundred, perhaps a couple of thousand, pounds and will only miss out on hitting 10-20,000 potential customers for a night or two.

Abandon search engine optimisation and you lose the potential to contact everyone, everywhere, anytime. And all for the annual cost of just a few nights in the local paper or on the local radio station. That’s not budgetary rationalisation, that’s website suicide.

Optimisation is the oxygen your website needs to lead a meaningful life. Without it, it will forever sit in a backwater of the Web; a once visited, now forgotten relic.

Times are tight and we all need to take a fresh look at our expenditure, but don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. If your business relies to any great degree on web-trade then you wouldn’t get rid of your pc as part of a cost-cutting exercise.

Search engine optimisation is as vital a component of your business as the website itself.

Not everyone has realised that yet, of course, so now is the time to take advantage of other’s poor decisions.

Some businesses will reduce optimisation work over the next few months. Their performance on the Web will suffer.

Yours will only improve. But only if you optimise.

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