With COVID-19 spreading throughout the country with only a few signs of hope, our daily lives are under tremendous uncertainty and stress. The pandemic has forced many to shut down their businesses – be it big or small- and many have also paused their SEO activities. Pausing your organic SEO or digital marketing campaign may seem to make sense, but remember, this current crisis will end and if you drop your SEO campaign all of a sudden it might pose a problem for your business. Your competitors may continue the SEO without you, you may fall behind and find it quite challenging to acquire clients when the industry is back on its feet. For instance, many plastic surgery practices had to shut down their practice or completely revamp their processes to sideline cosmetic procedures and focus solely on emergency ones. In such cases, many practices chose to hold back their medical SEO though temporarily. However, medical practices that continue with their marketing efforts may have a huge advantage over those that don’t.
Whether a pandemic or some other major crisis, some things never lose their significance, which includes SEO. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a set of rules for optimizing your website so that it can achieve higher rankings in search engines’ organic results. In today’s competitive market, SEO marketing is more important than ever, for all businesses. So, use SEO to effectively sustain your business in different ways.
Here are some ways that SEO could be helpful during this pandemic
- Opportunity to show empathy: When a pandemic strikes, it’s the time to be an understanding friend and show empathy towards your customers through certain expressions such as we understand, we care, valued customers and so on. Show the human side of your business as it might make people happier when they know they can relate with a business and the business understands the situation. If your business is helping the community in some way during the epidemic, share that in a newsletter or find a way of including it in your content.
- Audit the content on your site: If you are a medical related business, then it’s a good time for you to audit the content on your entire site. You can suggest topics and create custom pages that can help drop light on some of the current procedures and processes you are focused on during this pandemic.
- Provides hope for long-term marketing: SEO done now is a seed for the future, as for many businesses, the future is uncertain. During economic downtimes, SEO is an especially smart investment in the future of your business. One of its key advantages is how cost effective it is compared to other channels, such as media. It will provide a way out after the pandemic.
- Promoting your business: Even though people are quarantined in their homes, they still are searching for different things which include products or services that relate to making their life easy during the pandemic. You can modify your content so that your brand or service continues to show up in the content. Some businesses share safety messages with their audience, so even if you’re selling products that may be the last thing on anyone’s mind during a pandemic, your brand is still visible in searches. Optimize for certain keywords that may relate to safety during a pandemic.
- Useful Audience Metrics: By noticing which keywords are trending or which of your site pages are reaping the most benefits from your SEO strategy, you’ll learn what your audience is searching for. With this knowledge, you’ll be able to adjust and provide other relevant content during this pandemic.
- Stay relevant: As people are now spending more time online, it’s best to enhance your online presence. Pay attention to create SEO strategies for your business, as it gives you a chance to stay relevant during a lockdown and even if visitors to your site don’t make purchases, they just might when things get back to normal.
- Maintain top-of-the-mind awareness: With a proper SEO strategy, your business can stay visible. Every business can use SEO to maintain top-of-the-mind awareness which will become an asset once this pandemic is over.
- Provides analytical insight into demand: SEO analytics helps to predict the demand curve for your goods or services which can be vital information that can help plan for a possible slump. However, during the pandemic, people’s needs change but it’s not always drastic. Sometimes it may be according to the amount of money they still have at their disposal. A person, for example, may buy chocolates during the first and second week of a pandemic but later they may find it a luxury that they can do without. SEO analytics tools can show you how fast interest in your product or service is dropping and you can start planning your next move. (business2community.com).
- Gain from searchers: Local SEO will help people (who still have the money but would rather not go out to spend it) find businesses that can provide for their needs within the area that they are in. SEO can keep commerce alive despite the hard times and if you ignore SEO, you will not find these people, and even if it’s a small revenue you might miss it.
- Builds trust: Building trust with your audience in such a crisis is especially valuable and SEO hinges on that trust. Users tend to believe in Google’s ranking system. For instance, we all go for first pages of the search results, because we assume that Google’s assessment of the top few links is accurate. So, ranking your service or brand on the top page of search results gives you inherent trust in the eyes of consumers. With proper SEO, you will achieve it.
According to Search Engine Journal, “search is a proxy for consumer intent and behavior, and the COVID-19 crisis is having a dramatic impact on search behavior, consumer mobility, media consumption habits, supply chains, and budgets. With these changing circumstances, businesses need to adjust their next marketing campaigns to alleviate risk strategically”.
Here are some tips to build a strong SEO program during this COVID-19 pandemic:
- Continue the path of SEO and social marketing
- Stay at the forefront of Google trends
- Improve your website’s security
- Reduce paid search and get ready for daily management
- Maximize email and ensure your clients/customers that you are here to help
- Don’t exploit and market efficiently
- Don’t promote Coronavirus sale or deals
- Help and support your community
However, from a personal standpoint, all you can do is stay indoors and practice social distancing during this pandemic, whereas from a marketing, business, and career perspective, you can make a great change during this period. As you may have more time now, use it as your advantage and put extra effort in ways of promoting SEO for your business so that you can grow stronger soon after this economic downtime. Make updates, do your research, collect data, keep up with the trends, and develop an SEO strategy. Healthcare mobile app development is one of the major aspects of SEO marketing, and you can develop apps that touch various aspects of people’s health. It also brings your technical capability before your target audience.
