Coronavirus has given rise to extremely difficult and stressful times, not only in our personal lives but for businesses across the globe. Companies are experiencing drastic declines in their lead generation and conversion numbers. Huge corporations with strong marketing infrastructures and brand identities are now cutting budgets because of the global pandemic. Google spent $18 billion on sales and marketing activities last year and they have announced a 50% budget cut as we move forward. Coca-Cola, with a $78 billion brand value, has decided to reduce spending on traditional marketing and move focus towards organic digital. Benefits SEO Insights During the COVID-19.
This is the time to step up your brand’s organic visibility. Your website’s SEO has never been more important. Companies are not willing to spend on advertising while users are consuming much more content than before. No matter what industry you are in, people are reading, watching and experiencing everything on the web and you do not want to miss out on this opportunity!
1. Cost-Effective: We all know that implementing SEO best practices does not cost direct money as such. That does not imply it’s free. Compared to other marketing options, working to optimize your search results through SEO is incredibly cost-effective. Optimizing your web pages for search engines needs expertise, research, focus and most importantly time. But once you get it right, the advantages of SEO are unmatched when compared to other paid advertising approaches.
2. Sustainable growth: If your webpage earns a spot in the top 10 search results for a decent volume keyword in Google, your organic visitors just grow on an exponential scale. And since the search engine algorithms have more than 200 factors to rank your page, you are likely to hold that spot for quite some time. And if you do lose your spot, getting it back is likely a matter of updating content or making small tweaks here and there. This is exactly the reason SEO is such an invaluable asset during these pandemic times. Leads from organic searches also account for a relatively better conversion rate than paid mediums.
3. Unlimited potential: Based on a survey, more than 50% traffic on all websites comes from organic search on an average. This is because of the billions of people regularly searching for relevant content over the web. This provides a company access to reach these people without paying for advertising. Due to COVID-19, many companies have changed their paid marketing strategies to focus more on organic growth. This is the perfect time for you to re-evaluate your strategy, if you haven’t done it yet.
4. Enhances UX: Following SEO best practices not only gives your website higher visibility on search engines but makes the navigation on your website more user-friendly. Optimizing your website for better site structure, shorter page depth, correct anchor text, internal linking, etc. accounts for a much better user experience rather than a website that has just been designed well to look good.
5. Supports content strategy: One of the top priorities for Search Engine Optimization is in-depth keyword research. The benefit of this is not only limited to identify words for which you rank higher or you could rank higher, but it creates a strong base for your content strategy. For example, the number of searches for “Any keyword” + COVID-19 has a tremendously huge volume these days, so might want to create content in different forms and for different channels to target those searches.
6. Builds Trust: I am sure this is something you are already aware of. Let’s say you are searching for something really common on Google. Just like the majority, you are more likely to trust the source that is ranked higher in the organic results. And that makes complete sense. Pages are also ranked higher based on how many people clicked on that result after searching for the same keyword, so what you see on the top is nothing but what has been found useful by most people. In this COVID-19 crisis, building trust with your target audience is absolutely necessary.
