Strategic Resource Intelligence
I have watched three economies from the inside, and each taught me the same lesson: the time to prepare for a downturn is before it has a name.
I was born in South Africa and studied Economics and Accounting at the University of South Africa. In the years after the 1994 elections the economy I had studied stalled, the rand slid and opportunity narrowed. I left for Europe.
Ireland was booming when I arrived. Then came the global 2008 Lehman brothers lead crash and subsequent recession. I lived through the crash, the collapse of the banks and the day the EU and IMF arrived with a bailout. I also watched what came next. Ireland's GDP per capita is now more than double the UK's. With about 8% of the UK's population, it produces an economy nearly a fifth the size (World Bank figures, 2025). Multinational accounting flatters those numbers, but the recovery is real, and it came from one of the smallest countries in the world.
From there I moved to work with US tech startups. I helped nine of them go from around $15m in venture funding to acquisitions of more than $200m each.
Booms, busts and exits have one thing in common. The winners were not the ones who reacted fastest. They were the ones who had already done the work. Here is the part of that work almost nobody talks about.
Get your house in order
One of the biggest failings of any organization, business or non-profit, is living on a single branded domain.
Every domain is a single point of failure. It can fail four ways:
- DNS. One misconfiguration or one registrar problem and you are gone.
- Hacking. One compromise and your only storefront is serving malware.
- The web server. One outage and there is nowhere else to send people.
- A Google penalty. One algorithm update or manual action and your traffic disappears overnight.
In a good year, any of these is a bad week. In a recession, when every lead counts and cash is thin, it can be the end of the company. You would not run your business on one customer or one supplier. Do not run it on one domain.
The ten-to-one rule of bad news
Whatever your view on redundancy, a reputation crisis will change it.
If you have not lived through one, you learn the maths quickly. To push a single bad article off the first page of Google, you need more than ten domains carrying good news that outrank it. And that only works if your domains are more powerful than the outlet that published the story. Most likely, they are not.
Downturns are when the bad news arrives: layoffs, missed payments, unhappy customers, a competitor briefing against you. You cannot build ten credible, ranking domains in the week the story breaks. You build them in the quiet years, so they are already standing when you need them.
Which domains to own: exact match and partial match
Not every extra domain is worth owning. The ones that earn their keep carry the keyword in the name.
An exact-match domain (EMD) is the search query itself, like plumberlosangeles.com. A partial-match domain (PMD) carries part of the query alongside a brand or a modifier. I have argued for a while that EMDs are back in SEO.
They are not a button you press to rank. They are an edge, and a real one, for three reasons:
- Faster relevance. A new site whose domain matches the query can punch above its weight against bigger brands with vaguer names, especially in local and niche markets.
- Simpler topical authority. When the domain is the topic, every page and internal link reinforces one idea.
- Free anchor text. People link using your domain name. If the name contains the keyword, so does the link.
The rules for doing it without getting burned are just as short:
- Use them where intent is tight and commercial. Local services, specific B2B offers, one city or one sector. They do not replace your brand site.
- Build real sites. A matching domain amplifies a strong site and exposes a weak one. Thin doorway pages are a liability.
- Think portfolio. One brand domain is the mothership. A small, deliberate set of EMD and PMD satellites gives buyers more ways in. I set out the full model in my multi-domain strategy.
This is the house you want built before the downturn: a hub that owns the broad topics, and satellites that own the narrow, high-intent searches where the money is.
More domains, cheaper clicks
Owning multiple domains expands your horizons on three fronts at once: SEO, online reputation management and PPC.
The PPC case is the easiest to put a number on. Say your Quality Score is 3 out of 10. On the widely used benchmark, that means paying about 67% above the baseline cost per click. Move the campaign to an exact-match or partial-match domain and you can reach a 7 or an 8, which earns a discount of 29% to 37% instead. That is a saving of around 60% per click, without doing anything else.
In a recession, when the ad budget is the first thing the CFO cuts, paying 60% less for the same click is the difference between staying in the auction and leaving it.
Search is still the biggest network there is
SEO is the cheapest return on investment in marketing, and it runs on the largest network. Depending on the study, organic search sends between five and ten times more traffic than all the social networks combined. BrightEdge puts search at just over half of all website traffic and social at 5%. SE Ranking's 2025 study has it at 47% against 10%.
Google even feeds its rivals. LinkedIn gets about 1.4 billion visits a month, and Semrush estimates that around 14% of them arrive from Google. That is roughly 200 million visits a month, which is generous given LinkedIn is a stellar asset owned by Google's arch-rival. Microsoft competes with Google in operating systems, cloud, browsers and search, and was briefly a challenger in the mobile wars too.
If Google sends that much traffic to a competitor's property, think what it will send to yours. When budgets tighten, the channel that keeps delivering after you stop paying for it is the one to own.
And in 2026, SEO includes AEO and finding the best AEO providers and services online is probably one of the biggest challenges facing owners.
Deny your competitors oxygen
A multi-domain strategy is not just prepping. It is about denying your competitors oxygen.
Every position you hold on page one is a position they do not. Every ad slot you win cheaply is one they must overpay for. A downturn weakens everyone, and the companies that come out ahead are the ones that kept pressing while others pulled back.
So do not let your competitors step up. Use the downturn to finish them. Take the market by out-ranking them rather than buying them, and antitrust becomes much less of an issue.
I have seen what a crash does to the unprepared, and what a recovery does for those who were ready. Get your house in order now.