The effects of Covid-19 on consumer behavior is the true definition of “change is inevitable!” After Covid hit, there was a sudden shift to massive online shopping. According to a UNCTAD study, more than half of the 3,700 consumers surveyed now shop online.
And not only that–but they also depend on the internet for news, health-related information, and digital entertainment. The survey posits online purchases have increased by 6-10% across most product categories.
The last thing you want to do as a business owner or marketer is to overlook changes in consumer behavior. This is because businesses that adapt to digital marketing will have the bigger piece of the pie. If you’re wondering how to go about it, that’s where SEO, the secret sauce of online marketing, comes in handy!
Why Search Engine Marketing Matters
SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s a significant component of search engine marketing, a digital marketing strategy that makes websites more visible on search engine results pages (SERPs). Why does SEO matter in the new era of digital marketing?
COVID-19 is Here for the Long Haul
A study by Phys.org posits Covid-19 virus’ mutation rate is at least 50% higher than previously thought. Up until now, the virus mutates almost once a week. This implies we should expect more covid-19 variants like the Omicron and Delta if no sustainable solution is found.
Marketers need to up their game since Covid is probably here to stay for the long haul. As we’ve already seen, search engine marketing is one incredible way to increase your marketing scope. Now more than before, you need to have a robust SEO strategy to acquire and convert leads.
Content is King
According to the UNCTAD report, over 50% of the surveyed consumers depend on the internet for news, health-related information, and digital entertainment. This means you have to educate, inform and entertain your target audience when necessary.
One way of ensuring your content is accessible is through search engine optimization. This way, you optimize the content for search engines while complying with searchers’ intent. Content marketing and SEO provide free value upfront, which comes back a hundredfold.
Qualified Traffic
SEO isn’t only about attracting search engines traffic. What makes it unique is the fact that traffic is already qualified. What does this mean? Most of the time, the traffic is intentional and ready to take the next action when called to.
While some searches are top of the sales funnel (in pursuit of information), others are bottom of the funnel (commercial). Commercial inquiries are often ready to buy products and services when the marketing copy is persuasive enough.
SEO is a Long-term Game
SEO is a long-term game! You’ll have to wait for some time before you can rank top of the SERPs. However, once search engines love your content, you’ll most likely stay longer on top of the rankings. During this time, you’ll be receiving free organic traffic to your business websites.
According to Forbes, SEO takes longer because of the following reasons;
- It takes time to build page authority
- SEO is broad and includes off-page, on-page, and technical SEO, which should all align
- Excessive competition for organic ranking on the SERPs
- The ranking algorithms keep changing
- SEO is a continuous process
5 SEO Marketing Strategies for Your Businesses Post Covid
SEO is the secret sauce for online marketing. However, you can’t get SEO right when you don’t know how to implement it in your new post-Covid marketing plan. That’s why we’ve put together five SEO tactics you can use to improve your business’s online visibility.
1. Reconfigure Business Model
The first step to winning in online marketing is to reconfigure your business model. By this, we mean you shift from a brick-and-mortar to an online business. Since more than 50% of consumers are shopping online, you want to be there when they come.
If you don’t have a business website yet, this is the time to get one. You also want to migrate your website to a more robust content management system (CMS) like WordPress. This is because it’s easier to optimize for SEO on this CMS.
2. Optimize Business’ Website for SEO
Next, you want to optimize your new or upgraded business website for SEO. The three aspects of SEO you can’t live out when optimizing your website are on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and Technical SEO. How do they compare, you ask?
According to Backlinko, on-page SEO is the practice of optimizing web page content for search engines and users. On-page SEO involves optimizing title tags, content, internal links, and URLs using relevant keywords and phrases.
On-page SEO is different from off-page SEO. According to Moz, off-page SEO refers to actions taken outside your website to impact your rankings within search engine results pages. Its main defining characteristic is backlinks.
3. Produce More Blog Content
SEO often doesn’t yield tangible results until you have published a decent amount of content on your website. One of the ranking factors in SEO is topical relevance and authority. So, search engines will take time to study your content to know where and how to rank you. This is the reason you need to front-load a ton of quality content on your site.
4. Paid Advertising
Google, the best search engine globally, offers both paid and free traffic services. Free traffic is organic, while paid traffic you have to pay for. Google’s prominent paid advertising is Pay per click.
It works the same as organic SEO since they all rely on keywords for optimization. So, apart from doing organic SEO, you can incorporate pay-per-click SEO advertising in your marketing plan to capture quick wins.
5. Optimize Content for all Search Engines
Undoubtedly, Google is the most popular search engine. Ultimately, there are more search engines to optimize your content for you other than Google.
This is an incredible way to widen your scope and increase your returns. That being said, you should create and optimize content for the following search engines!
- Youtube
- Yahoo
- Bing
- Amazon
- Social Media
- Yelp
- App store
- Zillow
Wrapping Up
Making profits or breaking even is a hassle for most businesses post-Covid, especially ones that haven’t switched to the online model. However, running an online business can also be daunting without adequate SEO knowledge. That’s why we’ve put together this guide to help you get started. So, be sure to contact us here if you have any questions!
