By now, most people probably are getting tired of hearing ?times are tough?. A line that was overplayed by every running public official in the last election is something everybody knows. Rather than looking at economic conditions as a giant beast that just simply can't be concurred, lets find a way to walk around it.

A quick glance at various stocks from television network affiliates to Google will show a sharp decline in advertising dollars being spent on traditional and new media. Google, this time last year was trading at more than $700.00 a share, now it's at $291.00.

The point is, you need marketing. The big mistake most companies make during tough times is decreasing marketing expenses. A sensible way to decrease marketing expenses, increase conversion, and continue to have a market presence during a down swinging economic time is to utilize search engine optimization.

In fact, during tough economic times, you are immediately thrown into a marketing conundrum. With less expendable income (be it consumer or business), you actually need to be exposed to a greater number of people/businesses to reach a qualified customer. This is where the Pay Per Click model becomes a problem.

Pay Per Click is of course when you pay a fee for each click on your ad. In theory, it sounds good because its performance based. No traffic, no money spent. However, based on the fact that you need more exposure at the time that you can afford it the least, Pay Per Click is a problem.

Let's say that you pay $1.00 a click for a pay per click ad in a search engine. When the economy was stable, you would get a new client after every 50 clicks. So the cost of acquiring each client was $50.00. If you based your marketing budget around that, you are now faced with a problem. You need more clicks.

Now you need to be exposed to more people to get the same results so your client acquisition is going to cost $100.00 because you need twice as many clicks.

This is where search engine optimization becomes your better strategy. When working with a solid search engine optimization company, you will have a set monthly fee. If your natural Google ranking delivers those fifty needed clicks or one thousand clicks, your SEO firm only collects the set monthly fee. So you can base your marketing budget on a predictable fee that is locked in for your term? usually twelve months.

So don't let the economy force you into having a zero marketing presence. There are customers are out, they just have to find you.