SEO Marketing In An Uncertain Economy

With the economy in limbo what should search marketer's focus on? WebProNews spoke to Milind Mody, CEO of eBrandz Inc, an SEO and SEM firm, about online marketing and advertising.

Mody said because of the economy "a search engine marketer might have to scale down branding campaigns in favor of tactics which yield great 'short as well as long term Return on Investment'."

Specifically Mody said that local search is an important part of the overall mix. "Client reviews and customer ratings form an important aspect of local search SEO. These reviews also helps in branding and reputation management. So I would also highly recommend working with clients on getting their customer ratings and reviews on local search engines."

He said he believes that online advertising is more recession proof than other forms of advertising and that research indicates that any decline in online advertising is because clients are slashing their overall budgets.

"In many cases, clients are reducing print and other offline marketing budgets and spending more online," said Mody.

"One thing working in favor of online advertising is that it gives quick stats. 'X' number of impressions or 'Y' clicks, 'Z' sales and 'AB' % Return on investment. Marketers love numbers. Its very difficult to get such numbers for offline advertising. However certain industries like Real estate and financial institutions have really scaled down their online advertising."

Mody says trends in SEO marketing in 2009 will focus more on local search and that companies will spend more on reputation management. He sees less spending on banner ads and less spending on social media marketing unless it is tied with some specific goals.

One of the biggest mistakes SEO marketers make according to Mody is in keyword selection. "Many times looking at client websites, SEO marketers have a gut feeling that a client's websites will not rank for generic key phrases. However, under pressure from client (and many times from internal sales team - to close a deal) SEO marketers agree to client's version of generic key phrases to rank on. This changes their SEO strategy and the end result many times is that client's website does not rank for generic as well as specific key phrases."

Mody says that link building is one of the most important aspects of SEO marketing. "Submitting a client's website to a few important directories clearly is not enough to rank a website. Many of them preferred buying links, but Google has been very vocal against link buying. Hence getting links for a client's website is very challenging. And it is perhaps for this reason that link building is one of the most important aspects of SEO marketing."