Just like any other business, COVID-19 has had an equal impact on SEOs and search marketing agencies. Despite, most of its optimization and performance takes places online, corona virus impact can be seen clearly.
Firstly, the search industry is primarily based on human behaviour, and the pandemic is affecting the same across several sectors.
For example, search for groceries and essentials such as face masks and sanitizers have seen a tremendous rise, which has led to a significant increase in the number of e-commerce sites.
Now that the whole world is under lockdown, here’s how COVID-19 is affecting SEO:
- Ecommerce sites selling essentials are surging up: Amazon and Flipkart have announced that they would deliver only essentials and groceries, and the same decision has been taken looking at the change in people’s behaviour amid coronavirus panic. Keywords such as toilet paper, hand sanitizer, wipes, face masks, N95 masks, thermometers show people’s concern.
What is the solution?
If you are running an e-commerce website, then you can list the essentials and groceries at the home page. Try to offer free delivery amid the crisis. Monitor the log files in order to ensure visitors are not searching tirelessly. Make the site easily navigable.
- Health and Wellness sites are swelling up – In order to find the cure for COVID-19 or prevention of coronavirus attack, people have started searching for natural ways to combat the deadly virus. With that, yoga and meditation retreat centres have decided to conduct online meditation and yoga classes.
As we all know, companies across the globe have called out for work from home, so employees are finding ways to beat the work stress from home amid the lockdown.
The solution
If you are an expert in the health and wellness field, then you know that your proficiency and trustworthiness with this type of content is more important now than ever. Make sure that you are efficiently answering people questions.
Try to create a podcast at your home, or go live if you are an influencer. In this way, you may see a good engagement in your business.
- How-to Recipe websites are experiencing surge – As all the restaurants and food outlets are closed, people want to eat their favourite food by preparing it at home. As a result, many recipe and food websites have experienced an increase in clicks and impressions, which may continue to increase the longer restaurants that are closed or operating at reduced capacity.
The Solution – Ensure you use structured recipe data in order to enhance the way your recipes; this will show up in search results in order to capture some of that increased demand for methods.
Also, you can consider publishing or promoting recipes that use fewer ingredients that are easier to get during coronavirus crisis.
- Travel website traffic are still all over the place – Surprisingly, the travel related queries are always on the rise – less than those of essentials. The main reason behind it is that most of the people are still stuck outside their home country and want to come back.
Search queries such as cheap flights are on the surge because with all the cancellations people have started assuming that airline companies will be selling seats at a super discounted price. On the other hand, people considering COVID-19 crisis will eventually come to an end after 3-4 months, so they are booking their tickets in advance.
Now that does not mean that the travel industry is on the rise, it is highly hit and travel SEO’S are helping their effort by closely monitoring their query data to check on the audience’s shift.
The solution
Travel SEOs can help this by closely and effectively monitoring their query data to see where their audience’s demand is shifting. The same data can be used to inform support and PR efforts.
- High demand of publisher’s site – Without any surprise, publisher sites are experiencing tremendous surges in traffic, clicks, and impressions. Amid coronavirus lockdown, people are looking for updates about the impact of the virus on the stock market to the economy overall.
The solution
Journalists, including bloggers, continue to report on coronavirus news and updates can leverage SEO by ensuring watching their log files to ensure AMP pages are not serving errors; monitor pages by publish date to provide search engine bots are crawling new pages as soon as possible. Moreover, use search data to inform where the public interest in at any given time.
- Restaurants are pivoting – Though there is not much data on the restaurants, the search effects are visible. The worldwide lockdown has forced restaurants and hotels to shut. However, those that are running are operating at limited capacity.
Keywords such as restaurants near me have seen a considerable downturn, whereas interests in alternatives like food delivery and hygiene food delivery restaurants are on the rise.
The solution – In case you do SEO for a local restaurant, you must be aware that they are closed instead of obliterating store hours. Consider adding a GMB question and answer around your client during COVID-10 crisis and lockdown. It will help you as many as people as possible to upvote it, so it appears as the question in the knowledge panel will benefit your clients.
- Volatility is present on the website all over the board – COVID-19 is one of those uncertain times, and the current volatility is impacting just about every platform to look into. In such times, empathy is the kind and setting up benchmarks can be helpful.
Finally, it is critical that during COVID-19 lockdown, make sure to be creative and try to engage your potential customers as most of them are indoors.
The crisis is yet to come to an end, so keeping that in mind, as an SEO, make sure to help your clients and try to design the strategies that could act as an injection of the digital marketing industry.
Thinking that digital marketing runs on the internet will only take you back in the race and can make your clients left out.
Want to keep up with the COVID-19 crisis? At Skylite Web, we have strategies that would help you to survive the after-effects of the lockdown. For more information, visit our official website now!
