Why You Need to Keep Up SEO Efforts During COVID-19
Back in 2008, as the economic downturn began, Rand Fishkin published a blog post on Moz highlighting an uptick in companies investing in SEO in the down market and provided his hypotheses on why this might be happening. Even though the digital marketing industry was an entirely different animal back in 2008, Rand’s observations still ring true.
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to pervade our communities, large, mid-size and small companies all share a common goal: stay in business. During these trying times, resources are shifted, and unfortunately, employees may be let go and budgets may be cut. Marketing is oftentimes one of the first budgets to feel the repercussions of a recession, but in this blog, we’re providing perspective on why SEO could be the key to keeping your business afloat for the foreseeable future.
Search Trends Are Accelerating During COVID-19
During quarantine, people are home and screen usage is up. This results in more content consumption and streaming, more online purchases, and more online behavior as a whole.
Understanding how user’s digital needs and search behavior is shifting will allow marketers to effectively pivot their strategy.
Even if folks are not necessarily buying products or investing in services right now, positioning your content and solutions in front of them when they are conducting their research during quarantine is a great way to build trust with them. For example, for SaaS companies, users most likely aren’t going to start investing in new software platforms while their teams are remote and revenue is decreasing (unless your software solves both of those problems). However, you can share how your service will potentially be able to help them down the line when this pandemic ends.
SEO Transcends Siloes & Divisions
Modern-day SEOs are using a variety of datasets, from paid search queries to audience research through polls, surveys, and interviews, in order to inform a cohesive digital marketing strategy. Your SEO resources, whether a third-party vendor or in-house team, have the potential to utilize these multiple, cross-divisional datasets to help inform business decisions in the wake of the CoronaVirus.
That leads me to my next point.
When PPC Budgets Get Cut, SEO is There to Support
As we inch towards a recession, organizations need to know where to pull back spend. Advertising channels like paid search or paid social will likely feel the ramifications of a tightening budget, so it’s more important than ever to ensure your website is prominent in the SERPs where it counts.
For our clients, there’s no better time than now to live into the vision of our founder, Wil. Wil is passionate about the power behind combining PPC and SEO data to provide actionable recommendations and achieve business goals.
Currently, he’s looking for areas where clients can potentially cut or reinvest spend due to changes in budget and quite a few pieces focus on leveraging SEO to mitigate the impact of Paid spend budget cuts.
You can use our free tool Saving Ben to help answer the tough questions from the c-suite really quickly and easily.
SEO is Long Term
When the dust settles and organizations begin to heal, your website’s visibility will be more important than ever. Making sure it’s optimized now for the future will aid in the recovery of your business from the impacts of COVID-19.
SEO continues to be one of the most powerful levers to pull in a time of crisis.
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