Marketers Find SEO Vital to Facing Coronavirus Challenges

Marketing Professionals Expect Search Engine Optimization to Help in Time of Decreased Budgets and Increased Challenges

Conductor, the leading SEO and content marketing technology company, today announced the results of its extensive survey of marketers’ responses to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

The survey, commissioned to provide insight into marketers’ reactions to the pandemic’s international upheaval, received 317 responses from marketing professionals including managers, directors, VPs, and C-suite executives from dozens of industries worldwide.

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Key findings include:

• 64% of respondents expect a decrease in their marketing budget for 2020.
• 86% said they anticipated coronavirus would make meeting annual goals more difficult.
• 63% said that search engine optimization is now more important than ever.

Seth Besmertnik, Conductor CEO, said: “Most media investments are fleeting. You buy an impression, you get an impression. You buy a click, you get a click. Your content and SEO are like bonds. You invest today. You begin to get yield today, and if you execute well, you continue to drive value for many years – without making any more investments. This is like a high-yield bond fund, not a lot of risk, and it just grows and grows and grows.”

Additional survey findings include:

• While decreased budgets are marketers top concern, staff reductions and channel limitations are also top perceived threats to marketing performance
• 29% of marketers will raise the bar for marketing ROI
• Despite reduced budgets, 72% of marketers say their goals will stay the same or increase

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As one anonymous respondent said, “We’re moving some of our cut media budget to SEO so we can maintain traffic and build our brand. We’re preparing for when consumer demand comes back and using search trends to monitor whether our audience is changing in any significant way so we’re ready on the other side of this.”

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