Tips to focus on to keep you ahead in challenging times.
Internet usage is at an all-time high due to COVID-19.
However, the areas that are seeing the most traffic are news sites, both global and local, health sites, virtual meeting platforms, video streaming and gaming.
The result of this hurts nonessential businesses who have seen their rankings drop on both organic and paid traffic. Many companies have pulled back on their SEO spending, wondering if SEO tips are a waste of time during the pandemic.
Companies such as web design and marketing in the hospitality and real estate industries have been severely affected. Vacation rentals became almost non-existent, island tour operators and transportation companies have fallen off the map.
In real estate, many properties were pulled from listings and hotels and restaurants closed until further notice. So does this make SEO now nonessential for these business during this time? The answer is NO.
Understandably many businesses are struggling and pulling resources from their marketing budget to cover various other shortfalls. Some tough decisions are being made. So focusing on SEO and your online presence at this time may not be top of your agenda.
Small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are not the only ones affected. Facebook has taken a considerable hit to its advertising revenue in the last two quarters, while Google has seen an unprecedented decline in revenue. Paying for paid ads (with the odd exception) may not be justifiable at this time.
So what type of SEO is worth spending money on to reap benefits at this time?
Here are my top tips and strategies to consider your focus on during COVID-19.
Utilise Coronavirus-Related Keywords
A useful trend SEO companies are using to gain short-term SEO traffic is utilising COVID-19. Ensure that your customers are kept up-to-date with how it is affecting your business and what measures you are taking to provide your products or services still.
The public is searching for companies and services under the guise of COVID-19.
Generally, they are looking for:
- Are you open?
- Do you allow office visits?
- Do you allow in-store visits?
- Are you conducting virtual meetings?
- What are your working hours now?
- Do you have sanitisation measures in place?
- Is your supply chain affected, will I receive my order on-time?
- Do you offer roadside delivery and pick-up services?
In a nutshell, information is the key right now. The more informed the visitor to your site is the more comfortable and trustworthy you and your brand look. It’s a strange dynamic at the moment!
Add to Your Website Content and Blog(s)
Staying relevant is vital, so keep writing content on your niche; this will continue to build traffic over time. Try to stay away from things that will go out of date quickly.
Try to focus on content that will remain relevant well into next year, so no quick SEO tips, fads, news, or events as they will lose their freshness and disappear quickly.
Blogs or website content formats to consider:
- Guides
- Lists
- Tips and tricks
- Information tutorials
- Videos
If you are finding you have more time than before the pandemic, then its a great time to start looking for an SEO company around me to help you building content.
The vast majority of sites that are in the top 10 ranking pages on Google are over two years old, with only around 1-in-5 being created within the last year.
Grow Your Email List
Running an informative email newsletter is a super way to reach back out to people you already know are interested in your products or services.
Keeping your customers connected and engaged right now is crucial to them coming back to you when the time is right.
It’s great for branding and reputation management as it is reminding people you are still around, have not forgotten them and value their future business. If you get it right, it will help drive sales.
Although email marketing won’t be directly responsible for SEO rankings, it will increase external links through user engagement which the search engines algorithms will recognise.
Another important tip is to create a newsletter archive. It serves two purposes, adds content to your website, and in-turn leaves an increased change of repeat communication with visitors to your site.
Here some ideas to consider to build a newsletter contact list:
- Have the sign-up icon prominent on the website, not hidden
- You can use Facebook or Google to run a lead generation ad For not much money you can build a mailing list by using a smart adds and target the right audience
- Engage by creating an online contest
- Offer a giveaway at Christmas
- Encourage subscribers to share your newsletters
Optimise Your Website
It’s time for a summertime clean up of your website. However, first things first you have to do some research. Finding out what content is not ranking well is essential.
If you don’t understand SEO analytics, now is the time to hire an SEO company or SEO specialists to run traffic stats reports. Enabling them to see what adjustments need to be made to highlight your pages will push you forward.
They will make tweaks like working on a better title or adding a more enticing meta description. You can also write more helpful content to the end-user. Even content that is doing well and still bringing traffic to the site, always give it some TLC.
These could be:
- Adding update information to the page
- Create a new compelling title
- Add more modern images and alt tags
- Include high-quality outbound links
So there are many ways to give everything a summer face-lift. A few tweaks here and there could easily see you move from page 2 to page 1.
Local SEO
Local SEO has always been useful and worthwhile. Maps and local queries have usually been of benefit to small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs).
However, now more people are at home than ever before local SEO has skyrocketed in necessity.
Get an SEO company near me or SEO specialists to ensure you are in every possible local business directory and citation sites.
Google My Business is your best friend in this regard, make sure you update it with all the latest COVID-19 information relating to you.
GMB also offers COVID-19-specific attributes to add to your business profile. Plus if you need something else, go ahead and add it to your ‘About’ section.
As we are witnessing COVID-19 is not going away and is resurging in countries that seemed to have it under control, so it could get worse before it gets better.
However, with such a global medical workforce coming together to find a vaccine, rest assured, it will get better.
Summary
The essence of current SEO is to gain trust from both the search engines and visitors to your website by providing long-term gain. Making SEO a priority now will pay dividends in the long run. So work with an SEO company or SEO specialists NOW, especially if you have time on your hands!
