Right now, is one of the best times to invest in SEO. Amidst such uncertainty, being prepared for the future is important. And not just the future. If you maintain your SEO efforts it can help you and your brand stay top of mind now.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking you can back off from SEO and then just pick up where you left off. This isn’t how SEO works. If you take the foot off the pedal now, it will allow your competitors to swoop in and dominate your industry.
Meanwhile, your website will slowly drop off the search results. Something like 0.78% of people click past page one of Google.
Now is the time to invest in high-quality content that educates your audiences and assuage their fears. If you create content and ethically market around the current COVID-19 pandemic, it will put you in good stead with your audience.
7 reasons you should be doubling down on SEO rather than backing off
In this article we are going to look at seven reasons why it’s in your best interests to double down on your SEO efforts. Some of those reasons are: the benefits of informative, quality content, understanding current search trends and treating SEO like a marathon.
By the end of this article we hope you’ll understand how important it is to maintain and increase your SEO efforts during this trying time.
- Understand the data: search trends and user behavior
Before COVID-19 the daily searches on Google were around 3.5 billion. During the pandemic that number has increased to 5 billion. With so many more searches happening, it’s important to be creating content that caters to your customers’ needs now.
Now that many people are working from home, their workday hours are different. And people are doing personal searches where they were once doing work-related searches.
With the right SEO tools, you can find what people are searching and create relevant content around those search queries.
- Now’s the time to create more quality content
Now is not the time for your marketing to go dark. This is the time to be looking at creating new pieces of content, but also to be exploring new content platforms.
Maybe you’ve been thinking about creating a podcast, YouTube series or webinar. All of this content will help get you in front of more people which can help your brand thrive during the pandemic. But you should also have more time to create quality content.
Quality content is any content that is well thought out, structured properly, and provides a lot of value to your customers. Creating a steady stream of this type of content can help to ensure you stay top of mind with your customers.
It also means your website will be found under more relevant keywords.
- Timely and relevant content
Timely and relevant content is a balancing act. You want to convey the message that you’re operating as normally as possible. But you don’t want to act like the pandemic isn’t happening. Ideally, you want to provide branded industry-relevant information about the pandemic that helps your customers.
This content probably won’t be salesy, but if done right, your customers will appreciate it.
- Optimize existing content
When creating content related to COVID-19, or indeed any trending topic, you want to make sure it’s optimized for search engines. This process involves making sure your content is structured in an easy-to-read format and uses the right combination of short and long-tail keywords.
This also works for content already published on your site. If you notice pages and articles on your site aren’t performing as well as you think they should be, you can optimize these through keyword research and rewriting. Optimizing previously published work is an easy way to help improve your presence on search engines.
- Engage in an educational marketing strategy to increase brand awareness
Not all your SEO content is going to be geared towards sales. Especially now. You can create content to showcase what your brand is during the coronavirus pandemic and how you’re helping your customers.
- Invest in SEO
Invest in high-quality SEO. Too many marketing agencies have treated SEO as a necessary evil. They sell it because people buy it, but they don’t have senior SEO staff who can execute high-level work.
This high-level SEO work is what will help you stay ahead of the rest. And when this pandemic dissipates, you will already have a head start on all those companies that closed up shop.
Because those companies who stop their SEO efforts now and going to come out of this with no rankings. No rankings mean no targeted traffic which means no sales.
- SEO is long-term, if you stop now, you’ll all but have to start again
Even though every subsequent point has mentioned this, it deserves its own space. We cannot stress enough that SEO is predominantly a long-term strategy.
Long-form content that answers questions and provides your customers with value will only help your brand awareness. And over a longer period, it will also help increase sales.
It’s able to do this because the more quality content you create, the more keywords your website is found under.
Creating long-form pieces of content can only help your business now and into the future.
Don’t quarantine your SEO efforts, increase them
We are in troubling times. A lot of businesses are struggling and not sure if they are going to survive. This is not about the survival of the fittest, it’s about the survival of the most adaptable.
Adapt to the times and be there on the search engines for your customers. By creating long-form quality content you will stay ahead of your competitors now and into the future.
The right SEO strategy will help your online brand survive the coronavirus pandemic and put you in good stead when this whole thing eventually blows over.
13 3 1
