Why You Should Be Doing SEO in a Pandemic

Don’t make the mistake of letting your search engine optimisation efforts slide during a pandemic. By maintaining a strong online presence, you can ensure you’re still benefiting from the exposure you need when the world returns to normal. By taking steps to remain visible on the leading search engines, you can secure a bright future for your business.

Increased online sales

People are spending more and more time shopping online and searching for the products and services you’re offering, even during this global crisis. Chances are your products are still required by many people, and it’s vital to make sure they can easily find them. If people can’t find you online, they won’t know about your products and will end up turning to your competitors instead.

Long-term benefits

By building an effective SEO campaign now, you can reap the benefits that it delivers for years to come, even when the pandemic becomes a distant memory. It is important to make sure your customers and clients know how you’re operating during COVID-19, so make sure your business hours are kept updated. You can also keep people informed about your latest news and developments on your social media pages and website. Make sure your contact information is still accurate so that customers can reach you when they need to.

Keep your customers updated

If you are now only trading online or have limited opening hours, you may be selling more products and services via the internet than ever before. As customers’ purchasing habits change, it’s incredibly important to adapt to remain relevant. For this reason, you need to place a greater focus on catering to your mobile customers, particularly as there was a staggering 50% rise in mobile usage between March 2019 and March 2020.

Blogging and creating other fresh content remains essential too. These show your customers that you are still active and very much open for business. New content will attract new users to your site and help you stay in the minds of your existing customers. Make sure this content is engaging, shareable, informative, and relevant to the unique times we are living in.

Make your voice heard

Although many people have now returned to work, a large number of individuals remain stuck at home, spending more time on their internet-connected devices than ever and ordering more products online than they normally would. It’s essential to communicate with your customers through a range of channels including not only your website and social media pages but email and online ads too.

SEO techniques to avoid

There are many SEO techniques that you should avoid both in and out of a pandemic. Over-prioritising keywords will not deliver the results that you are seeking, and attempts to stuff keywords into content where it doesn’t belong are easily detected by Google. Write naturally with human beings in mind – when you give too much priority to keywords, articles can start to seem awkward and unnatural. Google is likely to penalise attempts any at keyword-stuffing, and your readers won’t get to the end of the article if it seems like it has been written with algorithms in mind rather than humans.

Prioritise quality

Avoid low-quality links and badly-written guest blogs, and don’t hesitate to get help with content creation and SEO if you need to free up time to focus on what you do best – or if you don’t feel you have enough experience to carry out these tasks successfully. Remember, Google is becoming more and more sophisticated and adept at weeding out attempts to manipulate its algorithms all the time, so attempting to fool it into delivering higher rankings will only lead to disappointment.