13 Feb SEO The Era of Coronavirus (Covid-19)
The coronavirus pandemic has reversed all that we call normal, everyday life. It’s certainly not business as usual, and it’s not going to be a long time to come.
Global economic crisis is pretty much a certainty right now, with both major and small companies trying to thrive.
As a result, there have also been major changes in the marketing environment, including digital marketing – and SEO (search engine optimization).
With half of the world’s population remaining at home due to locking or “circuit breaker” steps enforced by different countries across the globe, internet traffic is expected to grow.
Even as more users remain online longer than ever in the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis, there has been a significant shift in behaviour that may have an impact on the success of your digital marketing activities.
Specifically, how do current online patterns impact the SEO strategy and success of your business?
And most specifically, what will you do to adapt to the current realities and make sure your company gets better off at the end of it all?
Let’s find out about it.
- Is SEO still important in the world of Covid-19?
SEO has been proclaimed as a long-term strategy strategy for wealth creation and branding objectives for the longest time.
However, time is a major obstacle for search engine optimization; it normally takes months – sometimes even years – for SEO to produce the desired results and generate the desired effect.
With coronavirus, companies are fighting to keep alive every single day, faced with a triple whammy of vanishing sales, straddled prices, and depleting cash.
You may wonder if it’s still worth following an SEO-centric digital marketing strategy?
Will it not be more successful to reallocate resources and resources into more proactive practices such as social media advertising?
Well, the answer to that is no.
Here are the explanations for this.
- SEO will produce outcomes easily if you do the right thing
Let’s get the most important point right out of the start.
Yeah, it is possible to refine the search engine to produce any degree of returns within weeks, even days.
You need to do your keyword analysis at a very granular level to achieve so.
But most specifically, you need to reconsider the whole traditional SEO strategy, which has been primarily guided by keywords.
Trying to rate with large search words (e.g. “hand sanitizer” or “online food delivery”) would not cut it down. Your website would only sink in an ocean of rivalry and firepower from larger, proven sites that dominated the market well before the coronavirus outbreak.
- Rely on your questions and answer them
Instead, you can look at answering users’ questions with clear, spot-on responses to the content you put on your website.
For example, questions such as “where to purchase alcohol free sanitizer” or “where to order an alkaline water filtration system” are highly purpose-specific and suggest a strong search goal.
Online pages with material that can succinctly answer questions like those above have a very decent chance of getting to the top of the search results in a relatively short time.
This is because Google prefers to view answers for question-based searches right on the search results tab, which essentially gives a shortcut to the top of the pack to the contents.
Based about how well content is organized and the amount of competition, we’ve seen clients’ websites pop from nowhere to the first page on Google search within a week.
- Accumulate the traffic crumbs of the search results
Invariably, question-based search phrases are long customized in nature and typically do not have a high traffic rate relative to header phrases.
The solution is therefore to recognize as many of the questions that your target audience may ask as possible, and to offer accurate answers to those questions on your website.
Both the bits of viewership and click-through traffic that come from this approach can be summed up as a very big amount.
And the best part of this kind of traffic is that the searchers are already eager to shop. And the conversion rate is going to rise.
- Keep the answers brief and to the point
Unlike the Skyscraper method, the answers to the questions described need not be lengthy.
Google usually selects only 2 paragraphs of your material that better address the query to be shown on the search results page.
Or, you can frame and format the answers in the form of a list. Google tends to support such material by showing up search results more frequently than not.
Precision and importance of material is certainly more relevant here than sheer duration.
- SEO has more financial sense
One of the most important problems that many companies face right now is the diminishing cash flow, and a vast majority of them are unsurprisingly reducing expenses, with digital media spending usually slashing being the first.
Even if any form of digital marketing operation remains involved, you may be tempted to redirect your SEO expenditure to other platforms, such as search or social media ads, which may lead to immediate outcomes.
The concern is that, with the new pandemic environment, people are less able to buy and exchange their capital individually.
So, no matter what, the conversion rate is going to be lower.
As such, in search or social media ads (on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn among others) where pricing is based on a cost-per-click (CPC) model, a poor conversion rate vis-à-vis click-throughs means that you are potentially getting lower ROI during this coronavirus time and worse off financially.
Search engine optimization, though, is typically a fixed-cost commitment that can only increase your ROI as time passes and your SEO efficiency increases.
- Adopting a two-pronged approach with full effect
At the end of the day, digital marketing platforms operate well not in isolation from each other, but in a complimentary manner that has an effect that is larger than the sum of their pieces.
So while SEO is still favoured as a stand-alone tactic for its greater net effects on the bottom line of a company, you can amplify the ultimate effect by integrating SEO with an advertising-driven market marketing campaign for wider visibility.
This involves, for example, launching an ad campaign on social media to maximize your brand’s visibility to your target audience and to inspire them to consider your brand and the goods or services that your brand can be affiliated with.
So, if the audience is not transformed to an ad advertisement, any of them will then search for your brand on Google or your brand plus a product word (e.g. “Rocksmith aircon service”).
And your brand should really turn up to gain and transform this subsequent traffic, which is made possible by a solid SEO mechanism that lays the groundwork for the online exposure of your company.
- SEO is building trust
In times of crisis and confusion, people still look to assertive leadership to help them negotiate the turbulent waters.
Psychological and subsequent purchasing activity is still the same during this time of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Any purchasing decision is made more prudent and calculated, with more questions being asked.
After all, everybody is trying to save cash and to refrain from investing until it is completely necessary.
- More authority and more revenue
Psychological obstacles must be overcome with a psychological approach, and the positive thing about SEO is that it gives your company a clear psychological upper hand when it’s handled successfully.
Both B2B and B2C customers prefer to view companies that feature on Google’s first page as trustworthy and authoritative.
This is no surprise, considering that statistically less than 1 in 10 searchers has ever disturbed searching search results past the first tab.
What this all means is that if your business is showing up on the first page of Google for your targeted search terms, you are automatically perceived as a trustworthy one, and more likely to attract enquiries and sales.
- Establish a clear content authority
From the SEO viewpoint, authority is built on the back of high quality content, not only optimized to Google’s tastes, but also, most critically, to the needs of your target audience.
Authentic material with new viewpoints and unfiltered views can be the primary drivers of the audience’s interest. Sameness and “me-also” narratives are no longer going to make it.
One of the easiest ways to achieve this is to maintain a blog that constantly projects your story around the globe.
You don’t have to post content every single week because your calendar requires you to do so. It’s good once a month, too, if that’s what your finances afford.
Consistency and discipline are essential here.
Sticking to a calendar to push content out daily is a sure-fire way to create a loyal follow-up and push your way up Google’s search rankings.
- SEO is your best bet to get back to the quick post Covid-19
Now, though the situation seems incredibly grim, one thing is clear.
The coronavirus pandemic is going to go away at some point.
As for all past disasters in modern history, the planet will still recover with vigor and speed to where it has been, and more frequently than not, exceeded and scaled new heights.
Then the real question that you need to ask yourself is:
Is your company ready to ride the surge upwards as soon as it comes?
When the global economy improves – and recovers – and all traffic and interest sales come in, can the company be able to take advantage of and catch all of them?
You would be, if your company is the first thing that comes up on Google’s search results as users start searching for goods and services to purchase.
But if you don’t start developing now, your rivals are likely to reap the gains instead.
If you’re going to invest in your business, the best and only thing that you should invest in right now is its future, and the key to that future is SEO.
Start building today for tomorrow’s recovery.
For more information about SEO Malaysia, please visit https://seo.ericanfly.com/
