7 Ways To Combat The Coronavirus Impact on Your Online Business Using SEO

Hi guys!

Before we dive into the topic, I hope all of you are taking the necessary precautions recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) to overcome the pandemic.

Remember, health before business!

While there are a few steps taken to help the businesses and the employees from the impact of Covid-19 on the market in the near future, for self-employed individuals and freelancers, help can be harder to find.

So, how is your business going to survive the economic tremors of the Covid-19 outbreak?

Well, the first thing to do is not to panic.

As a digital marketing agency, we have seen so many clients and SEO friends shutting down or pulling their contracts until further notice.

While this may seem as a sane idea now, this act is laying a stage for more long-term struggles that will be hard to recover from.

Be it a family-owned business, a small retail store, a private company, an ecommerce, or brick-and-mortar; everyone is facing a hit due to the outbreak.

There is a lot of economic uncertainty that awaits us in the future, right. But, this does not imply that we will not recover from it.

Talking about the impact of the outbreak on the search engine results -

While paid search acts as a live auction, organic search is more of the zero-sum game, i.e. your organic rankings are evenly balanced out by the organic positions of others in the search results.

Therefore, organic search is not dead. It is very much living, competing, and if you’ve stopped all work to maintain your organic results amidst the outbreak, you’re in for a long-term struggle.

Because of so many ups and downs in the market lately, the search engine rankings are often fluctuating. Therefore, you must invest at least a bare minimum level of marketing investment throughout the pandemic to ensure that your search engine rankings remain unaffected after we successfully combat the virus worldwide.

In this article, we will discuss seven important SEO tasks that you should be working on right now to ensure a speedy recovery from Covid-19 impact on your business -

1. Conduct a mini-audit of your content

Keep an inventory of the content you have on your website to date. A complete content audit will take time and a lot of expertise, however, you can conduct an audit on a smaller scale.

If you have no record of the content you have on your site till date, this is a great time to start working on it.

Create a Google or Excel sheet and list down all the type of content you have -

• Webpages
• Blog posts
• Emails
• Ebooks
• Presentations
• Whitepapers
• Videos
• Infographics
• Articles on third party websites, and more.

Once you’re done with making a list, next, evaluate each of these content pieces, and answer the following questions -

• Which of these content pieces can you repurpose for other marketing channels?
• Which of these content pieces got the maximum shares?
• The maximum backlinks?
• Which ones bring the maximum on-site traffic?

By analyzing your content on these parameters, you can create opportunities for updating high-quality, fresh content, optimize for new keywords with new CTAs, create your internal linking structure, and remarket your website when the business picks up.

2. Try out webinars

If you’re struggling to manage in an empty office, webinars are the best way right now to take your business further content-wise. By conducting a webinar, you can answer your visitor's frequently asked questions, introduce new offerings or features to your customer base, and also inspire future purchase later this year.

Webinars have been a highly impactful content marketing tactic precisely for B2B businesses, as research says that about 91% of B2B professionals consider webinars as their go-to content channel for learning.

3. Use this time for your administrative work

Clean up files you don’t need anymore, write those blog posts that you’ve meant to write but didn’t have time for, conduct a thorough SEO clean up. Research webinars and podcasts to stay updated with the market trends, work on the pitches and ideas for pitching in the future. Take time out for reading marketing books to get inspiration to plan out future marketing initiatives.

4. Work on different other types of SERPs visibility

If you have a small business, you should check out other ways of appearing on the search results that are sophisticated and appealing. If, earlier you didn’t have time to figure out the different types of SERP visibility, now is the time for you to dig deeper and learn about paragraph snippets, video carousels, related questions/people also ask, top stories, knowledge graphs, and more.

This way, you can make sure that your brand gets a detailed coverage on the search results, increasing the possibility of more clicks and traffic.

5. It’s time for video content!

If you’re not living under a rock, you’d already know that video content is taking the world by storm!

They can help you target better long-tail keywords, are more likely to appear in featured snippets, and also, appear in relevant YouTube searches.

There are other innovative ways in which you can use video content as an advantage. For example, you can embed the video and include its transcript in your blog post.

You can further take screenshots of the video and use it as a repurposed image-content for social media.

You can highlight quotes from the video transcript and turn them into images and use them on your brand’s Instagram profile in the upcoming months.

6. Attend to your online reviews

There must be several reviews online that are still waiting to be answered by you. This is an excellent time to attend to these reviews with a good, thoughtful response.

Work out some template responses, train an employee on how to deal with negative reviews, offering legitimate services to solve customer grievances.
Research the web and give your employees the right tool to monitor online reviews and create customer satisfaction reports.

7. Update your Google My Business Profile

Google has provided suggestions on what measures the businesses worldwide should take in case the outbreak impacts them.

Google has published a new GMB (Google My Business) help page with which it is encouraging businesses to update their Google My Business Profile with accurate information. Update details like business hours, business description, and contact information based on what changes your company has made amidst the outbreak. You can also publish a blog post regarding the changes your business is undergoing using Google Posts.

FINAL WORDS

As a responsible business, what measures are you taking to keep your industry’s head above water?

• Can you host a platform where people from your industry can discuss the trend, the current situation, and maybe exchange tips or tricks relevant to your offerings?
• What can you do to float authentic-rumour-free information to your community about the pandemic?
• Can you encourage honest conversations with your employees and your customers, answering their concerns?

You have a responsibility towards your employees, customers, and your community, true! But you should not forget to take care of your health and take time to come to terms with this quickly evolving threat.

As a professional SEO agency in New York, we are committed to stand together and do everything that we can do at our end to fight back the Covid-19 spread together.

So, how are you tackling your business in the times of slow-down? Let others know below in comments.