The coronavirus and its effect on organic traffic. Should you change your SEO strategy?

With the COVID-19 situation continuing to affect people, businesses and communities everywhere, we know it matters more than ever to stay in touch with your customers. So you may be asking:

• How do I raise traffic to my site?
• Which subjects should I cover to hold my customer's interest?
• How has consumer behaviour changed?

The global pandemic known as COVID-19 is affecting almost every part of life around the world. It is no longer news that the virus has changed the way we live. We have to wait this period out at home, while adapting to circumstances that are unpleasant and often unwanted. The epidemic affects not only health but changes consumer behaviour and the way people search the internet.

As a result of the coronavirus, search behaviour has changed drastically. Such behaviour will continue over the coming weeks and months. This period brings a sharp rise in certain keyword combinations — "at home" paired with other words: exercise + at home, painting at home, working from home and so on. Consumers are also searching for and buying more of what they consider essential to overall health and fitness.

As the global economy reels from the reach of this disease, businesses are shifting strategies, gathering cash and preparing for the worst. Even if overall sales of your product or service fall because of the economy or the pandemic, you can offset some of your losses by investing in a comprehensive search marketing programme that will help you stay ahead of the competition.

The following recommendations can help you improve your SEO strategy and your content so they reach your audience.

Your site should have a page devoted to COVID-19 information.

This step matters particularly if your company is significantly affected by the coronavirus pandemic. Building a dedicated page to capture everything relevant to the coronavirus can help hold on to some of the organic traffic you would otherwise lose. You need not educate people about the emergence of the coronavirus — that is not your business's aim either. What you should tell them is what your company is doing given the new situation. The fashion brand H&M, for instance, tells customers in detail how its sales will continue.

Our client fingo.sk is working in these difficult times to educate its customers, help them find their bearings amid rapid changes and offer them financial services.

On the GLS site you will likewise find information for customers on how to proceed when handing over or collecting a parcel during the pandemic.

Find new subjects to write about

Take care over what you publish on your site. If your content does not hold attention, your customer will move to the competition very quickly. Consider producing current, interesting content. It need not lead directly to a sale, but it can genuinely help people in your field and build a good name for your brand.

It will be essential to catch the new subjects emerging that people are searching for now. Having the right content at the right time could be the difference between somebody arriving on your site or visiting a competitor. But how can you build and pin down a content strategy when the subjects people search for change fast?

If you are out of ideas, you can take inspiration from Google Trends in the Explore section. There you will learn about trending searches in various categories. So you will very quickly get a picture of what people are searching for now and where to focus when producing content.

Google Trends should come first when producing content, so you understand the changes in search behaviour. To spot emerging trends you first have to pick the keywords that matter to your business. Bearing in mind that people are at home, think about the modifiers that could be added to those keywords. If you are a company that cooks food, for instance, you can add terms such as "delivery", "takeaway" and "drop-off" to your keywords.

Product marketing

COVID-19 has led organisations worldwide to reconsider their marketing strategy and start making changes. Once we get used to the new way of living, we have to carry on running our companies — and that includes releasing new products and services.

As you reconsider your approach to bringing products to market during a pandemic, it is worth noting that not every launch will make sense right now. When product marketing works well at one company during this pandemic, it does not mean it will work the same way at another. Before you move ahead, it is important to assess with your team whether a product launch will be well received at this time.

The question we ask is: how do you approach announcing new products in a time of crisis?

• Use your own know-how — your sales and support teams are the best source of inspiration for content. How is your product used? What are the newest and largest problems customers run into? Which product information can you turn into an article? Find out the most frequent questions and requests from clients and write a FAQ article on the coronavirus and your services.
• Update your content — people are interested in the current situation, so your articles should hold relevant information relating to the coronavirus crisis. Find new ways of surfacing that information so it helps every customer.

The key is answering the most important question: what do our customers need from us now? There is no single "right" answer, but these examples and observations should help you work out what crisis marketing ought to look like for your company.

I hope you enjoyed this article and learned something new about improving your SEO strategy during the current situation. I would be glad if you wrote me a comment on how you are handling the crisis, or contact me by email at brezakova@invelity.com.