SEO Tips for business owners during COVID-19
Search behavior has completely shifted during this time. Before COVID-19 more and more industries and companies alike were noticing an influx in their mobile search website traffic while their desktop search started to dramatically decrease.
Since COVID-19 social distancing and quarantine recommendations have been set in place since March, SEOs and other companies are starting to notice an influx in their desktop website traffic again, which means one thing, COVID-19 is yet again changing not only companies operations but how their target audience is searching for their products and services.
As social distancing has been extended until May 1, 2020 and even in some cities the extension is being reviewed to be until July 2020, this leaves consumers with hours, weeks and days for online internet usage from YouTube to live streaming their favorite musicians.
While all companies are struggling to deal with this new reality from leadership and management to now being pushed to finally be 100 percent digital, this curve is something that no company can prepare for.
Because of this, and our new normal for the foreseeable future, it is imperative that a company understands that organic SEO is going to be the catalyst for their company’s overall success and continued growth after COVID-19 is over.
Here are SEO tips during COVID 19 that all companies should be taking as seriously as possible.
Create a landing page
Depending on what type of industry your company is in, a company might find themselves with a plethora of COVID-19 questions, keyword phrases and ideas that all need to be answered for their audience, but where should this content go?
A great idea is to start creating that content, duh. The second best idea is to create a landing page on the company’s website that provides any consumers who land on this page or the company’s website with that plethora of information that has been provided to them by your company. It is imperative that this information is properly optimized for organic SEO and even paid SEO strategies such as PPC ads! This allows for one page specifically to be optimized for any keyword phrases while still driving targeted traffic to the company website.
Long-tail keywords
Long-tail keywords are one the search phrases that our experts spoke about above that would be perfect for a landing page. There are two different types of keywords in the SEO industry- short and long tail.
What is the difference between the two?
Short tail keywords are keywords that are more generalized with higher volumes for their specific search phrase. A common example would be “Corona Virus”. This keyword has a volume of over 27,000. This means that this keyword is consistently being searched into search engines such as Google. A short-tail keyword is also one to two words within a phrase such as “Denver SEO” for a local keyword phrase.
On the other hand, there are long-tail keywords that are lower volume keywords that are targeted search phrases. These keywords are more targeted because their volume is much lower when compared to short- tail keywords which means that a specific audience is searching for this keyword or phrase not a larger general audience.
Why would a company want to grab those keywords over short-tail keywords? If a company is new to SEO or has a brand new website, their overall credibility and authority in Google and other search engines is lower than larger competitors. This gives these companies the competitive advantage to garner the right audience in a shorter time frame while still working towards those short-tail keywords.
A number of competitors will be searching for those general keywords, but the ones who implement long and short tail keywords will come out winning at the end of all of this. Not only does it stop there, but another critical part of all of this SEO research is local SEO.
Local SEO
Local SEO is one part of the overall local marketing strategy that hyper focuses a company on gaining organic SEO rankings in their local territories and state. For a number of companies in hundreds of industries, the first strategy is to make sure that they rank in local search queries because their audience is first and foremost their local community.
A searcher will type into a search engine the query “plumbers near me” and the home service and plumbing companies that appear in that search are based on the local Map Pack but also on relevance, proximity and prominence of a company’s website.
Local SEO accounts for a number of in-store traffic on an annual basis, but with COVID-19 shutting down companies and not a single store having foot-traffic, why does it still matter? It matters because a searcher will still type in the same results into a search query, get the same results from Google and then proceed to the contact us form or call the company itself.
From there, understand that SEO tips during COVID 19 are hyper focused on the situation at hand, but these tips are ones that companies should have been implementing months ago to be in search engines now. Another important notion to keep in mind is that Google is constantly changing; however, the information that shows in its search engine is based on an algorithm and EAT.
Google Updates are critical
Google updates and Core Algorithms are critical for SEO throughout the year, but with Google honing in on their algorithms for COVID-19 and any related articles, it is imperative a company understands this as one of the main SEO tips during COVID 19.
At the beginning of COVID-19 in early to late March the overall Google Volatility was extremely high week after week, this alerts those in our industry that a major update is going to be happening for one specific industry or something drastic such as the BERT update last year.
Google has updated their search results for local restaurants, Google My Business, the EAT algorithm, Google News and a number of their other services to provide consumers with the most reliable and relevant information possible for their search queries during COVID-19.
From here, with all of this information, what is the biggest challenge and SEO tip for companies right now during this crisis.
Do not cut the budget
In times of uncertainty in business, this is when a company will start to review their spending habits a bit more, and when this happens a lack of understanding of some of their marketing strategies might lead to those being cut.
If a business owner does not take any other of these SEO tips during COVID 19 into account, this is the one that all business owners should take into account after this is all over.
What happens when a company decides to cut their SEO budget? In short, a company starts to lose ranking and stops garnering any new keywords that were being captured due to content marketing strategies.
Stopping SEO during COVID-19 is an easy way for a company to start losing those qualified leads and traffic that they were garnering before, and once you stop SEO, another competitor is starting up their strategy. If you aren’t implementing SEO, someone else is, and a company is just letting their competition win.
Companies all over should be taking advantage of the best Denver SEO company services now and for the entirety of their business’ life.