With more and more evidence of the spiraling economy all around them, marketing departments and firms everywhere are bracing for a hit.

Historically, marketing has been disproportionally on the receiving end of layoffs and budget cuts once a recession kicks in, but will this ring true for those in search engine marketing (SEM)? The Google AdWords-driven ecosystem, being relatively new compared with other elements of the marketing mix, has not yet been stress-tested by a major, all-encompassing economic recession.

Pay-per-click (PPC) search marketing is well positioned to sidestep much of the inclement economic weather, and here are 10 things you can do now to avoid (most of) the guillotines looming over your counterparts in traditional marketing.

1. Trim the fat on your PPC campaign

Yes, the CEO of a PPC management firm is actually telling you that you might need to lower your PPC spend. At Apogee Search, we have been moving away from a pure percentage-of-spend billing model to reduce the gross conflicts between traditional PPC and media buying compensation plans, which have a strong incentive to always recommend that clients spend more and more.

The hard work with PPC budget reduction is that you don't want to just lower your daily budget on the search engines, lower bids across the board, or do other sweeping things that will also cut your lead flow by the same percentage that it reduces your spend.

Some campaigns are highly optimized, making fat-trimming more difficult, but most campaigns are wasting a portion of their spend on audiences that will never convert. Now is the time to refine your campaign to ensure that you pay only for relevant traffic.

2. Add negative keywords

Run Google search query reports to see what actual search terms are driving your traffic (and costing you money). If you are using broad match at all, chances are there will be some irrelevant terms in there that will surprise you. Add these irrelevant terms as negative keywords in both Google and Yahoo.

Are you seeing a lot of lines like "108 other unique search queries?" Most analytics programs will show you a list of the search queries that brought traffic to your site, and you can supplement Google's data with these reports.

Don't just focus on reducing unwanted clicks, also trim out irrelevant impressions. Why do this when you are only paying for clicks? Because it will actually reduce your costs. Google has put more and more emphasis on its quality-score algorithm, and one major element of a keyword's quality score is the click-through rate. If adding negative keywords removes 20% of your impressions on a keyword (those that were so irrelevant they weren't generating any clicks), that would increase your click-through rate by 20%. The corresponding increase in quality score should increase your average position or decrease your cost per click.

3. Refine ad copy

Now is the time to stop wasting money paying for clicks from people who will never fill out a lead form. Many companies default to exciting ad copy that is focused on grabbing attention and generating clicks. In a tighter economy, ads need to be targeted to attract only relevant traffic.

Make your ads specific, and make sure they accurately represent your company. Often it makes sense to use your ads to actively qualify prospects. For example, if in your search for customers you are looking only for companies with over 50 employees, consider saying so in your ad copy. If you are looking only at helping people with more than $10,000 in debt problems, consider saying so in your ad copy.

4. Add dayparting

Another good way to reduce spend without reducing overall performance is to daypart--turning your ads off entirely at times of the day that don't deliver quality traffic. Be sure to test your assumptions. Depending on your audience, you might see viable traffic after business hours or on weekends.

Tip: When analyzing your lead data, be sure to sort them by first-visit time, rather than actual lead conversion time. We sometimes see companies that think clicks at a certain time are worthless because leads don't come in at that time. But if there's a long lag between first click and lead, the assumptions can be incorrect.

For example, if a company doesn't see good leads until 9 AM Eastern, it might want to pause its campaigns overnight until 9 AM Eastern. However, if there's an average 45-minute lag time between first click and lead, then a better choice would be to pause campaigns until 8 AM Eastern.

Google allows you to pause campaigns at certain times, and also to selectively lower bids. Turning your campaign off entirely on the weekends might be overkill, but automatically reducing bids 50% on weekends might give you a similar number of qualified leads with less cost.

5. Increase your conversion rate

This will often turn out to be the single most powerful leverage point you have in your toolkit for SEM campaign performance.

Let's say you have a Web property with a conversion rate of 2%, and your monthly PPC investment produces 20,000 clicks per month. That comes out to 400 leads per month.

Now let's say you increase that conversion rate 20%, so you have a new conversion rate of 2.4%. With the exact same traffic, suddenly you're generating 480 leads per month. Your sales force would probably be happy to see those extra 80 "free" leads.

However, a 20% increase in conversion rate is actually on the low end. For lead-generation campaigns that are currently sending visitors to regular pages within the site, a specialized landing page can double or triple conversion rate. Optimization of existing landing pages using professional tactics and tools often increases conversion rate 50-100%.