As the global credit crunch starts to bite deep, businesses the world over are feeling the pinch, along with the consumers whose cutbacks in spending are causing the problems.

Shrewd businesses, and those who have been around the block once or twice and seen it all before know only too well that in hard times, as well as working harder, you also have to work smarter to make it through.

Often as the cashflow dwindles, a business’ first instincts are to cut back on spending on all non-essential items, and this is where a fatal mistake is so often made, in that traditionally, advertising was often seen as one area that was optional.

This could not be further from the truth.

Many businesses have gone under due to killing their advertising budget at the most critical time,  when all the smarter businesses knew that far from reducing advertising and marketing spend, it should be increased.

Hard times should be seen as an opportunity to increase your market share, by poaching from your struggling competitors as they reduce their market presence, and ultimately remove their lesser business genes from the Darwinian business gene pool.

Ask any business who has been around long enough to survive a recession or two, and this approach is nearly always the same, as your competitors go under, through making this most basic mis-judgement, your increased market presence and customer awareness means that you can pick up their old customers, now looking for a new supplier and actually emerge from the period stronger, if a little leaner.

Being as SEO is a relatively new discipline and we havent really seen a global recession on this scale like this since the late 80′s, and some are saying since the Great Depression in 1921, it certainly seems like the minor blip after 9/11 will seem pretty insignificant by the time this one is finished anyway,  this will be the first time this is applicable with SEO as the subject, but as Search advertising and marketing have to a large extent bitten very deeply into traditional advertising formats, Radio, TV & The Printed Media (…where do you think Google’s billions have come from ultimately?)  we can safely assume that the SEO-savvy businesses can apply the same logic to SEO in this recession, as the business savvy ones have done in the previous recessions, and that businesses that make SEO work well for them during the difficult times to come, should emerge leaner and stronger, having actually picked up market share from their dying competitors along the way.

Business SEO Services have never been more important as they will prove to be for the duration of the credit crunch,and the global recession that inevitably follows. Businesses both large and small will all have to decide our business strategies over the coming months and years, and the value of SEO Services will be a part of that decision making process.

As we are old enough to have seen this all before, we urge you to make your upcoming decisions wisely.

Luckily as an SEO Company ourselves, we don’t have to ponder the worth of Search Engine Optimisation to our own business, and we will continue ever onwards on our chosen path of Global SEO Domination but be assured we will feel the pressure from the credit crunch very acutely, through increased pressure to perform above and beyond the call of duty, and to ensure that it is OUR customers (who mostly become our friends very quickly too) who are the ones who emerge through the other side of the troubled times ahead, in as good as shape as possible.

We wish you all the very best of luck in the times to come.

Part 2 on this theme here  Credit Crunch SEO