How will the next recession of 2020 affect the SEO industry?
Most experts predict that the next recession is about to happen anytime in 2020 , this is primarily because both Chinese as well as American economies have slowed down. Moreover , the US — China trade tensions have created a setback for many other economies.
But just like big names disappear overnight (the way it did during dot-com bust or Great Recession) — most tech companies today, are under tremendous pressure created due to this economic slowdown.
But what really happens to the digital marketing industry in the next recession?
To understand this more deeply , lets turn back and look at the 2008–09 recession. While most companies were firing employees due to poor balance sheets , increase in debts and lack of sales — Google was only one company that made profits inspite of the Great Recession. The internet marketing company made unbeatable profits as much as 26 %.
Users will continue to search in the upcoming recession as well. They might search more but since the buying power reduces more emphasis would be given to comparison based buying — which is also a win-win situation for Google.
So this is what really happens during next recession :
1.Most people would switch to PPC instead of SEO — Search Engine Optimization being a time-consuming process.
2. Performance based advertising is the key to survive during recession as rightly said by Neil Patel .
3. Brands will advertise aggressively in order to survive the tough competitive market. If companies/brands are struggling to survive with their existing product — they will either upgrade , modify or replace the entire product and for each of these stages they would again be dependent on marketing. So paid ads and paid search listings will improve in volumes.Here again , PPC wins!
4. Hiring SEO experts will come with a long time financial commitment , hence there would be a drastic shift from hiring full time employees to hiring result oriented freelancers.
5. Content creation in the form of Podcasts , Videos , Blogs will give interesting career opportunities to writers , artists , video creators and sound engineers. SEO content writers and copy writers can also see this as a good opportunity.
6.There are some industries that are safe from recession or recession-proof just like food and beverages , cleaning services , education , law enforcements , medical and pharmaceutical industries , etc. Thus the marketing activities in these domain will not change much. Therefore SEO professionals who are looking for job security or project commitments must stick to these domains in order to survive recession.
7. These days there are hundreds of SEO softwares tools that build SEO without any human interaction. These tools come for cheap costs and are preferred by most companies as they do not have to onboard full time or part time employees.
But should one really depend on tools and wait for keywords to rank magically is the question? I shall write a new blog magnifying this topic really soon, but in my opinion automated SEO is the future.
