Coronavirus has impacted nearly every part of how business is done. Many workers are remotely working from home and a large number of non-essential businesses are closed to the public. All is not lost, however. As more people shelter at home, they’re finding more free time to spend online. Cloudflare, the website security and content delivery network provider for millions of websites, has been following the dramatic increase in internet traffic since the virus started spreading. The coronavirus may have shut down brick and mortar businesses, but internet use is up. Is your company taking advantage of the uptrend?
SEO may be more crucial than ever to get customers to visit your website, especially if you have an e-commerce store that currently competes with online giants like Amazon or Walmart. There’s a high volume of traffic out there; you just need SEO to capture a bigger share of it.
Optimizing Your Product Selection
Before you get into the SEO journey, it’s important to have products and services worth buying. Now is a great time for small businesses to revamp their product selections and expand their offerings. If your business has been affected by the coronavirus, how can you pivot your goods and services to capture the COVID-19 market share?
An idea on how you can position your products to resonate with online customers at this time includes adding a hygienic or sanitary focus to your items. For example, if you sell women’s apparel, producing face masks in your best selling prints and patterns is a low-cost way to expand your product lineup. Focus on your best-selling items and add face mask suggestions that coordinate with the best sellers. The upsell can add a few extra dollars to your shopping cart sales which is good for your bottom line.
Speed Up Your Online Presence
Google has certain requirements for companies looking to rank high in their search engine pages. Mobile optimization and page speed are a couple of factors Google considers in mobile search ranking. You can run a Google PageSpeed Insight test to get a better idea of your website’s performance.
Web hosting is important for your page’s speed as well as SEO. The speed your host provides you can make or break your ranking. If your website is laggy, you may need to outsource your website design for optimization and upgrade your hosting plan for faster load times.
Expand Your Content
For SEO to work best, a variety of content is helpful. If you’re not regularly posting to your company’s blog, start today. Since more people are spending more time online, create a variety of blog posts that range in topic from self-promotional posts about your goods and services to timely and related human-interest stories for entertainment.
For example, e-commerce retailers that sell drones may want to share stories about how people are using drones to deliver gifts or items to friends or neighbors. Kitchen retailers may want to post easy, healthy recipes that families can make at home.
If you’re not comfortable with writing content, you can outsource the writing or use alternatives. Adding video marketing can set your business apart from the competition. The YouTube channel, 5 Minute Crafts, has 66.7 million subscribers interested in short videos such as 24 Incredible Egg Cooking Tricks.
People love short, informative videos. Embedding videos into your website could increase how much time visitors spend on your website and lower your bounce rate, which can help your Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Plus, viewers may share your videos to social media, growing the number of visitors that come back to your website.
Work With an SEO Specialist
You could take an SEO crash course from Google to get leads and clients, but you may miss out on newer concepts and approaches to search engine optimization. Many business owners don’t have the time or energy to put forth into mastering SEO enough to effectively implement it.
The right SEO partner can handle the search engine aspect so you can focus on providing good products and services and grow your business. There are a variety of questions you should ask when you’re in search of the best SEO company:
- Does the provider follow Google Webmaster Guidelines?
- Does the team provide SEO-targeted written content?
- What type of results can your company expect from working with the SEO provider?
- What is the timeline for seeing results?
- Can the SEO company provide case studies of how they helped clients with SERP?
Once you choose an SEO specialist, it’s important you work with them on what they need and respond to their requests in a timely manner. Although your expectations include that the provider can handle the job with little management from your company, there will be times when your input and interaction are required.
Take Advantage of COVID-19 to Transform Your Online Presence
The outbreak creates challenges for small businesses, but also provides plenty of opportunities for online growth and improvement. Tighten up your service and product offerings, clean up your online presence, optimize how your website and e-commerce store functions, and turn to an SEO expert to take what you’ve built to deliver traffic your way.
