COVID-19 has had an impact on many businesses, with physical operations either slowing down or having to stop completely. This has led some business owners to slow down their marketing operations as well, as they don’t feel that there is a point while their business isn’t open. However, investing in marketing and SEO is more vital during this time, as they can be crucial to your business success.
So, let’s take a closer look at why SEO is so important, and look at some strategies your business can implement at this time.
SEO and COVID-19
There is a lot of search trend data available that shows that traffic to website driven by search results – whether organic or paid – has declined for a lot of industries recently. So, does this mean that spending on SEO is irrelevant during the COVID19 pandemic? No, because:
- COVID19 will stop trending eventually, whereas SEO is a consistent task that needs to be continued over a long period of time to achieve success.
- Customers who are not allowed to travel throughout the country, are looking for solutions to their problems in their local neighbourhood.
- There is no bad time to publish evergreen content, which is a staple of SEO success.
- Any visitors you do attract now will be quality visitors who definitely want your products or services.
- Search is only going to be more ingrained after the pandemic as more and more people have been driven online while stuck at home.
What SEO strategies should you use during COVID-19?
There are four main SEO strategies you should concentrate on this year during the COVID-19 pandemic and they are:
- Consistency. SEO needs regular maintenance. It can be very tempting to see that you have achieved great rankings and decide you don’t need SEO anymore, but actually, once you stop doing SEO you will quickly lose these good results and drop further and further down the search engine results pages. You can’t ignore SEO during the pandemic, as whatever you do now can affect your business dramatically post-pandemic
- Content. Everyone’s pace of life has slowed down over the past few months, which means people now have more time to read into topics deeply rather than scrolling endlessly through their feeds. Not only is long-form content most likely to get read now, but it is also a key element of SEO success. If your business has slowed down because of the pandemic, then now is also a great time for you to use the extra time to stockpile blog posts that you can then publish over the coming months
- Local SEO. Local SEO has always been a good bet for small businesses as it is a way they can compete against large websites and big brands on search. With people staying close to home as well, this is now more relevant than ever. Local SEO is important for businesses of all sizes, but it may be key for those businesses that are still operating and don’t have time to create content
- A mix of short and long-term goals. The coronavirus pandemic will end at some point, it has to. However, the impact of it is going to be something we all feel long-term. With this in mind, therefore, it is important that your SEO strategy contains both short-term and long-term goals. Short-term efforts may include publishing content relevant to coronavirus and updating your Google My Business listings to include local search terms. Long term goals should focus on content that will answer your customers’ questions after the pandemic
What content should you use during COVID-19?
SO, we’ve talked about keeping up with your SEO and the importance of long-form SEO but what should you include in your content:
- Target coronavirus-related keywords to boost your traffic as they will be trending
- Target trending themes that are applicable across industries, such as ‘DIY’, ‘in-home’ and ‘outdoors’
- Revitalise old content to make it newly relevant
- Target new search queries such as ‘social distancing party ideas’
- Carry on creating evergreen content to build your SEO traffic over time
- Update existing content which is well-performing by adding quality inbound links, new information, and changing your title tags to make them more compelling
Turn your focus to conversion
Traffic to your website will no doubt be in decline during the COVID19 pandemic as people shift their focus, which means that those who are still finding their way to your site are really interested in what you have to offer. This is why you should turn your focus to conversion – which is CRO (conversion rate optimisation) rather than SEO (search engine optimisation) – but who’s quibbling? If you can’t get more people to come to your website, then you should concentrate on getting more conversions from those who do visit it.
The team at SEO MCR can help with SEO, CRO, and everything in between and are here to support you both during and after the coronavirus pandemic. Get in touch today to find out more.