Is the SEO of your busi­ness or your clients busi­ness affect­ed by the cur­rent glob­al pan­dem­ic? Here are a few ways you can keep your loss­es short and be ready for future organ­ic success.

With regard to the cur­rent eco­nom­ic uncer­tain­ty, it has been found that con­sumers will now be spend­ing less on prod­ucts and ser­vices that aren’t seen to be ‘essen­tial’. These non-essen­tial prod­ucts could include the likes of cloth­ing, fur­ni­ture, and electronics.

Coro­n­avirus (COVID-19) has seen thou­sands of com­pa­nies tem­porar­i­ly shut (online and offline), with many peo­ple los­ing their jobs. Busi­ness­es have been told to expect a huge shift in the usu­al con­sumer pur­chas­ing behav­ior, as they are steer­ing away from active­ly spend­ing on prod­ucts and ser­vices temporarily.

Although you may see short term loss­es for the next few months, it’s vital that you plan for the future so that you see the least amount of effect on your busi­ness.  Many busi­ness­es will pan­ic and under­es­ti­mate the fact that online busi­ness­es take time and must be worked upon regard­less of an ongo­ing pandemic.

In the SEO world, how­ev­er, many clients have begun pulling con­tracts at oth­er firms and shut­ting down their mar­ket­ing ops for the fore­see­able future, which is com­plete­ly inef­fec­tive. If you go about it like this, you’re set­ting up your busi­ness for long-term adver­si­ty, an uphill strug­gle in which you’ll find it hard to recover.

There is one thing for cer­tain though — we will recov­er from this. How­ev­er, not doing any­thing whilst the pan­dem­ic is ongo­ing won’t mit­i­gate the dam­age. It is essen­tial that you pri­or­i­tize clients in any way pos­si­ble. You must be invest­ed in build­ing on organ­ic growth, mean­ing you should ensure clients obtain qual­i­ty data with con­tin­u­al­ly mon­i­tored mea­sure­ment tools. Like­wise, it is vital that you con­stant­ly build audi­ences and cus­tomer bases, with con­tent that will be ranked on search engines.

More­over, doing things like col­lat­ing con­tent into a Google sheet to max­i­mize the ways in which we can help clients would be effec­tive. This includes the likes of info­graph­ics, web­pages, emails, blog posts, and videos. You can then use these con­tent ideas as oppor­tu­ni­ties to enhance client web­sites with fresh con­tent, opti­miz­ing CTAs, adding key­words with greater search vol­ume and repro­mot­ing the client once the busi­ness begins to pick up again.

You can then use these content ideas

Ses­sions and impres­sions of your online site may drop, how­ev­er, if your rank­ings are main­tained, then the decline can be attrib­uted to the impact of COVID-19 search vol­ume. Busi­ness­es should be aware of the impact that COVID-19 has on their brand and fine-tune it around the virus. There is a mul­ti­tude of ways you can change up your strat­e­gy to keep users on your site for longer:

  • Have a ded­i­cat­ed page about coro­n­avirus — if your busi­ness could sig­nif­i­cant­ly be impact­ed by COVID-19, it may be use­ful to cre­ate a page to cap­ture the traf­fic search­ing for coro­n­avirus, which should link to key areas of your site.

  • Ensure that you have an FAQ page and con­tin­ue to update it — review your cus­tomer ser­vice and read over your FAQ pages to estab­lish whether the lan­guage needs chang­ing. If nec­es­sary or if your busi­ness is con­sid­ered essen­tial, add FAQs relat­ed to coronavirus.

  • Con­tin­u­al­ly mon­i­tor the changes in SERPs and Google algo­rithms —  busi­ness­es that are essen­tial could see a spike in changes in the SERPs and with­in organ­ic results dur­ing this pan­dem­ic. Be mind­ful and mon­i­tor the changes and performance.

  • Update your Google My Busi­ness pro­file for local search — if you’re an essen­tial busi­ness and you’re look­ing to retain your local cus­tomers, take spe­cial care to avoid the COVID-19 spread and update your hours and the descrip­tion on your Google My Busi­ness pro­file so that if peo­ple are try­ing to reach you, they know what time to con­tact you.

Always remem­ber that you have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to your employ­ees and cus­tomers as well as the larg­er pub­lic. Focus on the future of your com­pa­ny by fol­low­ing our tips and once the pan­dem­ic is over, the hard­est peak you will have need­ed to climb will have already been tackled.

SOURCE: Dig­i­tal Doughnut