I think a key aspect is to view all marketing efforts holistically. Online marketing, and SEO being isolated from each other is inefficient, but even more so, a huge disconnect often exists between the overall market strategy and SEO in larger entities, but the same ripples into the small entity as well. Ideally the message and methods are onpoint throughout all efforts.

As far as strategy goes, market research is key. The best SEO in the world to reach the wrong market will likely result in poor performance. The challenge is to determine the market going forward, where upon many of todays tools just look at the past. Ie basing a campaign on the prior 6 months of data without some level of projection based upon current political, social, and economic data is likely not to work out too well.

As recession looms, companies will look to cut their ad spending that includes search marketing. Advertising trails the economy in a recession as advertising budgets are usually committed in advance.

But we have very little time to observe in terms of how online advertising responds to macroeconomic shocks. Google has already lost 35% of it market capital, Yahoo laid off 10-20% of its staff.

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Along the lines with your jewelry merchant story, I read about retailers advertising things that would appeal to Japanese audiences on the morning of December 25th, because the western world was opening presents and the Japanese were the majority of people online at the time.

In what may become a shrinking market place,your message is an absolute rifle shot on what needs to be discussed and implemented, in order to grow during what could prove to be difficult time.
Concise and articulate. Thank you. Drake Morton, President/CEO Drake Morton and Associates, Inc.

Maria nailed it. It’s nearly impossible to run an SEO campaign with just a checklist of 1,000 todos. It helps to set monthly/weekly quotas and routines that systematically moves a campaign forward. First, a quota forces you to work against a deadline, which can increase the likelyhood of getting thins done. Second, it forces you to focus on tasks that give measurable results instead of vague goals like “build more blog subscribers” or “get more backlinks.”