Refocusing on SEO in a recession can be a great strategy.
It's possible for it to become a no/low-cost traffic strategy that'll persist into the economic recovery.
You can do much of it yourself and many tools can be purchased for a one-time payment or can be used for a couple of months and then cancelled.
SEO can start working within a couple of weeks, though early results will be small. It can improve incrementally though, week-by-week and month-by-month.
After the recession is over the benefits will continue and could even accelerate as spending starts back up again.
If you want to do one thing for your SEO right now, add to your product descriptions until each product has 500 words of unique content.
Yes, each product should have unique content.
That'll help you out everything with your SEO as content is Google's purpose in life. Having unique content will set you above many other stores.
For more SEO ideas, there are dozens more in my Shopify SEO guide.
Another SEO idea that works well is structured data. They help enhance your existing search results to attract more buyers.
It's also extremely easy to add that if you use JSON-LD for SEO as it has codified my structured data advice and recommendations into the software itself. That's years of expertise, all available to you for a one-time purchase.
Eric Davis