Will SEO be important moving forward?

As businesses all over the world continue to re-emerge into a new landscape, many are considering the importance of their search engine optimization strategies. As companies scramble to get up and running again, does your SEO marketing need to be re-structured or even abandoned? There has been some recent research released by Conductor, and published at MarketingLand, that seems to indicate that SEO will be as important as ever to the future survival of your company. Below is some of the findings that have been taken directly from that published research:

The survey had 317 respondents drawn from Conductor’s extended network across a range of industries, including B2B (24%), Retail (12%), Healthcare (11%), Media (10%) and others (travel and hospitality, consumer technology, financial services, insurance, automotive, e-commerce and manufacturing).
Asked “Will SEO be more or less important during this time?,” 63% said SEO would gain in importance either slightly (34%) or steeply (29%). Only 5% responded that SEO would decrease in importance.
Organic search was seen by 66% as these marketers’ top performing channel last year, followed by paid search (50%) and email (50%). Social media was named as the top performing channel by just 14%. These perceptions will drive future marketing decisions in a downturn.