How SEO Can Help Save Your Business During COVID-19

To prevent coronavirus from spreading too fast, more and more countries place increasingly harsher restrictions on the population. The number of temporarily closed businesses grows daily and thus, the global economy is dramatically affected by the coronavirus. The adverse effects brought about as a result of this virus grow daily and it’s undeniable we’re facing an economic crisis.

The effects on the economy differ significantly depending on the amount of time needed to resolve the problem of the virus. If we are able to take care of the virus in the next month or two, then the impact on the online market will be minimal.

On the other hand, if the time needed to exterminate the threat brought about by the virus is extended, then the negative impact will spread even more to the online market.

When the virus first hit, the lockdown restrictions meant the number of people using the internet for their basic needs was consistently rising. But since then, online spending has dropped as many people are no longer paid a full salary, have been let go from their permanent employment or are unable to go to work. Thus, the competition between eCommerce brands has become fiercer. As an online business owner, if you haven’t prepared for this dip, you will be out of the game in no time. You can read more on this topic here — pandemic effect on the online business article. Professional search engine optimization (SEO) can be used to make sure that your website will thrive in these times.

How Is Your Website Performance Affected?

The performance of your website depends on the method you’re using to acquire clients. For example, if you use a pay-per-click (PPC) strategy, then you may get more sales when the number of people buying online is increased. But the cost will most certainly not remain constant. When the volume of sales drops as consumers refrain from online shopping due to a decrease in income, the cost of acquiring clients through PPC will rise dramatically. It is almost certain that this cost will be too high for most businesses. More information about the effects of coronavirus on PPC strategies and campaigns can be found in this searchengineland.com’s blog. 

Instead of making a profit with this strategy, most brands will lose money. The best solution is to change to another marketing method or to change the goal of the PPC campaigns. By changing campaign goals you can shift from sales to branding. In doing so, you invest money in the future of your business and retain your target audience’s interest, which will likely turn into sales someday soon. In times of crisis, no one wants to buy, but everyone wants to be entertained. So instead of selling now, focus on creating a follower base and customer engagement. However, changing the marketing method is probably the best move. Professional search engine optimization (SEO) is the best alternative strategy in this instance. Why? Because SEO services can take care of many marketing needs simultaneously. Meaning you can focus on creating a follower base and sales at the same time.

How Professional SEO Services Reduce Your Losses?

As explained above, in the period where many businesses are closed, the number of online sales you make will drop drastically. For this reason, you should make use of professional SEO services to reduce your losses as much as possible and maybe even prepare your business for a comeback after the crisis period ends.

To do that you must take advantage of the time during which the online market is booming with new online consumers. This is the time to focus your efforts on SEO and make sure to attract as much attention as possible. Don’t focus on making sales, but rather on attracting online visitors and enticing them to subscribe to your website. You can keep your visitors and potential customers entertained, informed and engaged with your brand. In this way, you gain your online audience’s trust. This type of constant engagement makes you their obvious first choice when they need products or services similar to yours. Also, even if you’re unable to make very many sales, your follower base will continuously grow through this marketing exercise.

What Are the Long-Term Benefits of Professional SEO?

You may already have an idea about some of the long term benefits offered by professional SEO. Here are the best outcomes of a robust SEO marketing strategy:

• Fame: By focusing your SEO efforts to help others with valuable content, you can be certain that search engines will help your content be known and seen by as many people as possible. Keep in mind that search engines want to offer the best information to online users. If your content’s quality is the best, it will show at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs). You can only imagine the number of visitors that your site will see when people spend most of their time in the house, surfing the internet.
• Reputation: The more people you help through informative content, the better your reputation as an industry expert. Most SEO strategies are based on content used to resolve the problems and curiosities of your target market. The more you get this right the more your business’s reputation will grow positively. This is very important for most businesses as a positive reputation is a major trust factor for consumers. 
• Follower base: Through your SEO campaigns, you can turn the increased traffic to your website from visitors to followers with the right retention strategies. The most used method for growing a follower base is by encouraging visitors to sign up as subscribers. Once they give you their email address, you can email this visitor your newsletters or marketing materials. You can try and sell directly to your follower base during the high online sales seasons, or during times such as at the beginning of COVID-19. You can also keep engaging with your customers about relevant topics not just on sales and promotions. In fact, rather don’t push for conversions during the low sales period because you may lose a ton of followers. The best way to make use of that period is to use content to deepen the relationship with your followers.
  

What SEO Agency Should You Choose?

First off, choose a professional SEO agency instead of trying to do your own SEO during times when you’re under pressure. Why? There are many reasons, here are the most important ones are:

• Speed: A full SEO agency will be able to implement strategies much faster than you. If you do not already have a team full of SEO experts at the ready, you will lose a lot of time. By using the SEO services of an agency, you will be able to see the results much faster.
• Skill: Even if you can assemble an SEO team very fast, which is a challenge, their differing skill levels or lack of cohesion as a new team will negatively affect the SEO strategy. An agency already has the skills and the teamwork required to offer and roll out high-quality professional SEO services.
• Experience: The experience of the agency is very important. The more experience they have the faster and more efficient they will be. 

Keep in mind that the reasons explained above do not apply to every SEO company. There are new companies that appear daily and there are older companies that don’t keep their skills relevant. Make sure that you find an outstanding and cost-effective SEO agency with a track record of producing high-quality results.

On the website, you will find the results that they produce for their clients, as well as thousands of reviews. Moreover, many agencies offer a money-back guarantee as proof of their skills and confidence. Of course, you can also get in touch with their past clients and get a first-hand opinion about them. You can find more tips about how to judge an SEO agency in this article on entrepreneur.com.