With 10 million cases of COVID-19 worldwide, we have seen social distancing, lockdowns and various steps implemented by governments to try to stop the spread of the virus.
This has already had a huge impact on the business community in many aspects, especially how people are now engaging with specific brands and how they are looking at conducting business in the future.
Businesses that continue their strategy and work alongside an SEO company can adapt to a changing marketplace, so will be cementing themselves in a strong position to supersede their competition and be in prime position when economies start to recover and consumer confidence returns.
Why Focus on SEO Amid Covid-19?
Organisations are hard at work to remain relevant to their respective target audiences to maintain and potentially increase their online rankings during this time.
With many bricks and mortar businesses forced to close their doors, and e-commerce businesses starting to cut back on marketing budgets to stay afloat, here is your chance to supersede your competition and use SEO specialists and digital marketing to maximum effect this year.
The shift towards buying online has already started, brands must be prepared for a second wave of the virus to hit many countries and some of the recent progress made on the ground to come back somewhat, so be sure to use the interim period to be relevant for your online customers.
Unbeknownst to many there are sectors and niche areas that have done well and the crisis has been the making of others. In the UK the number of local businesses that thrived delivering food and drink parcels firstly to the elderly and then to pretty much everyone, (negating the big supermarket chains), came as a surprise and with people continuing to work from home, they are now looking ahead and in a small market whoever cements their SEO strategy now will stay ahead for the foreseeable future.
Consumers are turning to the internet from this day on, so you need to meet them head-on with an engaging and seamless online experience. Much of the growth in sectors has been mobile devices, usage has surged from 2019 to 2020 with a 50% growth in usage.
Therefore, you must be mobile-friendly, with high-quality content and imagery, this must be an engaging encounter for your prospect.
How to Thrive in SEO and Digital Marketing
Attract new users with targeted content.
The focus here is not just for your brand to attract traffic but to thoroughly engage with them through the experience with targeted content. This allows you to learn about your customers, their preferences, interests and especially their thoughts about the current global situation.
Make sure you never bore your potential customer, and you are using the right tools to analyse everything, information gathering is vital for you, but keep the UX entertaining and take them through a process, not an exam.
This is also the time to look around the market for tools to help you to find high volume searched keywords, to in-turn create the target content.
Hire an SEO Company or Specialists
This is the perfect time to align yourself with an SEO company. Right now there are some great deals to be had in hiring top-class talent to assist you with professional instruments and experience.
Important Trends – Stay Ahead
While building your organic strategy, please note that people’s situations are in flux and often we see the rise and fall of several trends. Keeping ahead of recent and relevant trends should lead to you using the right content to keep your users on your website.
Pay close attention to your relevant keywords and use tools to evaluate the search volumes.
Help your Customers with Positive Thoughts for the Future
As many of your consumers are stuck inside and may well end up working from home permanently in the future, your content can drive them to plan on what they will look forward to when things return more or less to normal.
This can be an opportunity for brands to promote events in the coming months, the thought of a holiday, for the travel industry right now, inspiring content will stand out. If the crisis lends itself to opportunities for your customers, let them know their options.
In an unstable market place, different situations arise for different sectors, especially finance, so always consider some opportunities could help people through uneasy times with positive offers and incentives, this is great brand recognition.
Remember at this stage it is primarily brand recognition. SEO and marketing strategies may end up working more towards future business rather than immediate sales, but remember everyone has just hit the reset button, so this is a re-building process.
Monitor your Customer’s Behavioural Changes
While you are working closely with an SEO company to create content, they will have the latest technologies to monitor not only your site but any changes in trending patterns and search volume.
Most focus was based upon which pages on your site created the most top-funnel leads. In these uncertain times, you could see more traffic due to less competition, however, your bottom-funnel lead pages are getting fewer views.
Working together with an SEO company will help to ensure you uncover these trends, so you can focus your attention in the right areas to stay firm through the crisis.
Maintain Relevant Ads
Ask SEO specialists about the validity of a PPC campaign. This would help to maintain your brand presence even in high volume searched keywords, and get a portion of that online attention on timely search terms.
Google has put measures in place for SMBs who were looking to cut back on their ad budgets.
Google recently announced a $340 million Google Ad credit to assist SMBs to continue to advertise. The credit directly benefits those who have a current Google AdWords account, with the view of helping good customers maintain their digital presence through unprecedented times.
Connect Users Across Multiple Channels
Engaging your users across multiple channels such as email, paid and organic will help you maintain a strong presence in the marketplace.
Make sure you work together to discuss the organic strategy thoroughly as you need your brand in front of as many new potential customers as possible.
A continuation of a paid ad strategy can help to keep you in the minds of many customers to maintain a good healthy position for targeted keywords and help your organic strategy as it develops.
Remember to work with them to create ads for crucial demographics on social media where before you would have struggled to rank.
If you can monitor past users who may have not visited recently but your targeted content got their email details, then go back to them through email.
Monitor these by using segmented email lists, each batch based on interests and concerns, and where they would fit in through the buyer’s journey.
Conclusion
When it comes to restructuring your business to deal with uncertain times, that is fine, but maintaining your SEO and digital marketing this year is vital in the face of a changing business climate.
Those who stay strong and engage the services of a digital marketing company or SEO specialists to work towards creating an organic strategy to last will last.
As many companies are being forced to pull back on their marketing budgets, here is your opportunity to either gain ground or pull away from the pack and don’t forget, right now many SEO companies and digital marketing agencies will be cheaper to hire than ever, take your chance.
Good luck.
