Bo Henriksens’s Weblog

When the winds of change are blowing, there are to kinds of people. People building windbreaks and people building windmills, which kind are you?

We’ve been asking that to a lot of clients lately. Because a lot of people are apparently building windbreaks instead of windmills. Some of our clients have contacted us, because the want to cancel their SEO agreement. The reason they want to cancel the agreement: ‘We all need to save money in these times of financial crisis.’ Then my next question is, are you stopping all your marketing efforts? I haven’t heard a single ‘yes’ to that question yet. So I begin to dig a bit deeper, trying to find the reason to why the cut their SEO efforts before any other online or offline marketing effort. The most common reason I’ve met, is that our clients doesn’t really understand what SEO is, and what it does for them. The second most common reason is that our clients doesn’t really understand the reports we’ve been giving them, so they really can’t see the value of it.

So we’ve startet improving our reporting, to really emphasize the value of our SEO solutions. Then we’ve begun educating our clients more in what SEO actually is. And last but not least, we’ve launched a service called Cross Optimisation where we focus on balancing your SEO and SEM investments to achieve optimal return. We’ve been able to reduce the AdWords investment with up to 50% for some of our clients while maintaining the same or higher return.

So my point here is, when then winds of change are blowing, build windmills. In marketing look at the ROI of your different efforts before stopping them. And if there is an area where you can’t see you ROI ask you instead of just cancelling it.

Other than that: Keep the money rolling, the financial crisis is just something we imagine.