Ok, so you don’t have to be an SEO genius to assume that search results are dominated by the Coronavirus pandemic at the time of writing this.
It’s the biggest pandemic on global societies for generations, and at present, there’s no sign of it abating here in Europe, or indeed across the world.
There’s no doubt these challenging times are causing employers to rethink both how they structure their workforce as well as what strategies are worth pursuing.
I’m not setting the precedence and rulings on how employers should manage their workforce, but the trend at least for digital marketers, is towards remote working.
But then the question is, irrespective of where you work, what should you focus on working on? And how should you refocus your digital marketing strategies to maximise the value you add to your business.
In this blog, I’ll highlight both where digital marketers and SEOs should focus their attention in the short-mid term period to deliver the most value to your business.
- How should you shift your digital marketing strategies during the Coronavirus?
- What should your SEO strategy be?
- Keyword Research
- Content Marketing & Optimisation
- Site Audits
- Technical Fixes and Improvements
- UX Enhancements
How should you shift your digital marketing strategies during the Coronavirus?
Digital marketing by its very nature is forced into being reactive and quick to change.
The main reason for this is due to the fact that skills, technology and algorithms are constantly transforming, and a failure to adapt is rendering your own skillset extinct – join the dinosaurs!
In fact, there’s even a rule called ‘Moore’s Law’ which simply explains that the number of transistors doubles every year.
What does that mean for you?
Well, in essence the speed and capability of computers is doubling every two years. With that comes a lot of change for how we need to respond and up-skill as digital marketers.
So, taking out the obvious human element of this crisis, for the profession this is simply another change to adapt to.
Naturally, your digital marketing strategies will be aligned (or at least should) to your marketing and business objectives.
You should have a full marketing mix of SEO, paid search & media (digital advertising), social media and emails as standard.
However, in these turbulent times, how should you recalibrate and tweak your overall digital marketing strategies?
Well, let’s break it down. I’ll use the example of an e-commerce business for simplicity.
Say you have a simple and straightforward e-commerce business. You’ll have a full digital marketing mix (as outlined above) that you allocate time and resources to in the aim of driving sales conversions through your website.
You’ll naturally see fluctuations in the effectiveness of different channels over time, taking into account work volume, changing trends and competition amongst a number of other factors.
However, pretty much in every case the long-term strategic advantage in e-commerce is developing and sustaining strong organic search positions.
Paid search on the other hand is more of a short-term component to supplement your search positions. They can help you further dominate screen real estate and target high conversion search terms and react quickly.
For instance, paid search and paid media can be structured to create a loop of brand awareness, prospecting, retargeting, converting and retaining.
A good model to follow on this is the Google, See-Think-Do-Care framework.
I know what you’re going to say – yes this can also be applied to SEO strategies as well. However, that is more about targeting your content marketing strategy at intent – I will come onto this later.
Email marketing should also be aligned to a similar framework and will likely be your lowest cost revenue generating channel.
It is most effective by segmenting customers and customising well-defined DRIP campaigns to deliver effective customer nurturing.
Social Media on the other hand is a little bit different.
It should be used (organically) as an extension of your firm’s personality. It is a huge brand builder in the modern era allowing you to demonstrate your values and principles, and as cliche as it sounds, what really sets you apart.
But in times of likely lower conversions and customer acquisition, paid search & media, email marketing and social media marketing shouldn’t be your major focus.
So where should you now allocate your resources in the midst of the coronavirus?
Simple, SEO.
Now, I’m not simply saying this because it’s my own personal specialism. It’s because high cost conversion channels (e.g. paid search, paid media, email marketing and any social media advertising) are about to take a huge hit (if they haven’t already).
There’s little point in focusing time and energy on costly channels at the present with global demand dropping for both goods and services.
It’s a terrible time for businesses and navigating through this will be incredibly challenging.
This is why focusing your efforts in the interim period on optimising for search (SEO) is what you need to be doing.
By this I mean doing robust keyword research, mapping out content marketing opportunities, auditing your website, focusing on technical fixes, and improving your sites UX (user experience). The list goes on.
In simplicity, when the short term channels are going to take a hit, focus your energies on the long-term return, and that is SEO.
What Should Your SEO Strategy be?
If I haven’t got that message across fully just yet, let me repeat, focus your efforts on SEO during the current situation.
The major areas you can improve will be different depending on your own circumstances and previous work and investment in SEO. For this reason, I’ll run through the highlights quickly.
Shift existing resource away from digital advertising in particular to cover the following elements:
- Keyword Research
- Content Marketing & Optimisation
- Site Audits
- Technical Fixes and Improvements
- UX Enhancements
1. Keyword Research
Completing effective and thorough keyword research often gets neglected in companies.
It’s frequently seen as a deprioritised activity against other pressing demands. I’ve worked at companies who simply hadn’t understood the relevance of spending time on this.
I’ll be clear – it’s essential to your organic search success!
In simplicity, without understanding what users are searching for, they’re not going to find your content easily through search engines. And let’s be honest, this is the main way your content is going to be found.
Dialling down the resource in other channels during this interim period, you should make sure keyword research is carried out effectively.
Using tools like SEMrush, Google Keyword Planner, Moz, Ahrefs and even Ubersuggest you should be able to compile full lists of keywords, structure them by topic and categorise these so they can also be applied to Paid Search when demand is able to return.
Without being overly indepth you’ll want to make sure you capture the following when conducting your in-depth keyword research:
- Brainstorm Topics – focus on identifying keywords that help structure broader topic areas
- Keyword Search Volumes – is there sufficient traffic to go after?
- Keyword Competition – are you in the position to focus on long-tail keywords or shorter search terms?
- Keyword Trends – are search volumes for keywords increasing or decreasing? Is their obvious seasonality (e.g. Christmas shopping)?
- Average CPC – the higher the average CPC, the higher the value is attached to ranking for a given keyword (e.g. if people are willing to pay a higher price to be visible, it’s usually a good inclination of the positions commercial worth)
- User Intent – are the keywords informational or Action focused? This should tell you what type of content the user wants to find
- Match Type (lower priority) – it’s useful to add keywords to a spreadsheet and add a column for this so you already have discovered keywords assigned to potential Paid Search campaigns and Ad Groups in the future
Completing thorough and accurate keyword research is a huge necessity to target key topics and keywords that drive you valuable site traffic.
To repeat a previous sentiment – it’s essential to your organic search success!
As the saying goes ‘failure to prepare, prepare to fail’.
2. Content Marketing and Optimisation
Now this is the chunky one.
All the other below factors in my list are more focused on taking advantage of reallocating resources and time to get your website up to scratch, supporting growth in site traffic and ROI.
However, content marketing is the main area to align your focus in these difficult times.
This needs to be split into two main strategies:
- Optimising Existing Content
- Creating New Content
Optimising Existing Content
Firstly, do a crawl of your sites main traffic driving content. For most of us, this will be the blogs and articles sections, for others this can be products and categories.
It doesn’t matter. Just go into your Google Analytics account and identify your main session driving pages from the past 6-12 months.
Next, order them in terms of priority both by number of sessions and page value (how much revenue Google Analytics attributes to that page).
Once that’s done and you’re happy with your full list of priorities, it’s time to audit each page and optimise accordingly.
The main things you’ll want to check your page and optimise for are the following:
- Title Tags
- Meta Description
- Headings Structure (H1 – H6)
- Image Alt Text
- Structured Data
- Readability (e.g. break up the paragraphs and make them easier to read)
- Typos & General Copy Accuracy
- Add New Sections to the Copy (if relevant)
- Update Broken Links
- Update Broken Video Links
There are some super helpful plugins to help you scan your pages quickly. I’d really recommend headingsMap to quickly identify any headings issues, and check my links to spot broken links on the page.
Creating New Content
Then there’s the trickier part, spotting new content to create.
Identifying these topics and keywords to write about can be the tricky part. You should make sure these are well mapped out following your completion of thorough keyword research.
However, you should take your research a little further in this stage and assess trends.
For instance, you’ll want to assess movements in search terms popularity based on shifting trends.
An example of this is the growth of ‘work from home’ as an overarching search term as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
As this trend is likely affecting a huge amount of the global workforce you can start to spot a potential shift in the types of content your users may be searching for.
For example, I can apply this trend to my own content strategy. I complete this by using this discovered trend to investigate if this affects niches more specific to me, such as ‘SEO in the coronavirus’.
By using Google Trends and brainstorming a number of topic areas I’m able to refocus my new content production towards growing trends that my users are searching for.
Hence, the relevance of this blog to those searching for SEO advice during the current pandemic.
You can even take this one step further.
Use trend analysis and brainstorming to best estimate the types of content that will likely be helpful to users given the current situation.
Examples could include content produced around a number of likely growing topic areas:
- Working from home/Remote Working
- ‘How to’ Guides – users having less physically close support
- Self Help Guides & Videos
- Opportunities for *insert job title* during the coronavirus
- Opportunities for the *insert industry* during the coronavirus
It’s not about capitalising on the situation, but about creating resources that are more focused and relevant to users during this period of change.
3. Site Audits
There’s a number of tools you can use to complete a site audit, but my personal favourite is SEMrush.
SEMrush has a site audit tool allowing you to crawl a certain number of URLs (depending on the package you purchase). This helps you to quickly identify any errors and warnings as well as SSL and internal linking issues.
Another helpful metric it provides is an overall score of your site’s health. The more issues you resolve, whether they’re duplicate title tags, duplicate content or hreflang and canonical tag errors, the better your score will be.
The speed of resolving these issues will depend on the size of your site, but they are a vital step in applying best practice SEO.
4. Technical Fixes and Improvements
Once you’ve audited your site, your changes should be focused on enhancing your existing positions for given search terms. This is essentially a movement from fixes to enhancements.
Identifying areas of opportunity here is key. The main areas to focus on are:
- Optimising for mobile
- Applying structured data
- Site speed
Optimising for mobile
You’ll want to make sure that everything you do is fully focused on being user friendly and quick on mobile devices.
Despite the current situation mobile search is still going to grow and grow in prominence.
You can quickly test your site with Google’s Mobile-Friendly test tool and use the suggestions to improve your website to better meet user needs when accessing your website across mobile devices.
Applying Structured Data
Structured data is an area that continues to rapidly advance as well. It’s even adapting to the rise in mobile prominence with a speakable schema now in the beta phase.
Getting a head start here could really help your site to start taking voice search traffic which is likely to be a key area of growth for SEO in 2020.
Outside of being aware of new schema opportunities to better flag your website’s blueprints for crawling search engines, is to make sure you are first ticking off the basics correctly.
The main structured data types you’ll want to make sure you apply correctly are the following:
This as ever will depend on your site individually, but usually these are relevant to the most basic website structures (including my own).
If you’re not confident in applying schema markup yourself and you’re a wordpress user, I’d highly recommend Schema App Structured Data, which takes away any fearful html coding and hours of googling the difference between JSON-LD vs Microdata!
Site Speed
Site speed is invariably now a huge ranking factor. Even if you have great content and a vast amount of high quality backlinks, you could be impeded by a slow site speed.
It’s been found that even a 1 second delay can result in a 7% drop in site conversions. So you’ll want to make sure your site is quick.
The major things to check and tick off are the following:
- Implement your own content delivery network (CDN) – e.g. use a network of localised servers to deliver your site quickly to everyone
- Use Adaptive Images
- Use Cache effectively
- Check Plugin Impact
- Enable HTTP keep-alive response headers
- Compress your content
- Configure expires headers – extend your website files expiration date past 24 hours
- Minify Javascript and CSS
- Check your hosting regularly
With each change you implement it’s great to test the impact on page performance with Google’s Page Speed Insights tool. It will also help you spot the main areas your page needs to resolve to improve performance.
NOTE: It may drive you mad at times with constantly changing requirements but keep on top of it regularly!
5. UX Enhancements
An often neglected part of SEO, is UX (user experience).
Essentially, it’s about fully identifying and optimising full user journeys. This includes your SERP results, your website landing pages and the pages users click on after they’ve landed on your website.
It isn’t simply about making your articles looking pretty and easy to navigate – that’s only one element.
You also want to be found by users and have landing pages that both align to key search terms and user intent.
To improve the UX of your site, and to achieve the long-term effect of better organic search positioning and performance, you’ll need to start with your own sites data.
Firstly, you’ll want to start with assessing your SERP results performance. Open up Google Search Console and map out the following:
- CTRs (click through rates)
- Impressions
- Clicks
- Keywords (what users search when they see your search results)
This information will help you understand how effective your title tags, meta descriptions, URLs and target keywords are performing at driving users to your various landing pages.
Secondly, you’ll need to open up Google Analytics and map out the on-page metrics. These include the following:
- Sessions
- Pageviews
- Pageviews per Session
- Top Landing Pages
- Avg. Time of Pages
- Bounce Rates
- Exit Rates
Use this data as a means of identifying how your content is performing for users.
For instance, if you see a short average time on the page, high bounce rates, low sessions and high exit rates, it’s safe to say your site needs work!
Addressing these issues is all about making the experience on your site simple, easy and frankly, enjoyable for those visiting.
You can achieve this by applying some of the following:
- Simplifying Content
- Introducing New Media (images, videos, infographics)
- Clear CTAs (calls to action)
- Decluttering your site navigation
- Mapping out clear user journeys
- Applying relevant links
Lastly, to improve the third leg of the user experience (where your users next click to), you’ll need to look at mapping out your internal linking.
Are users bouncing off your site quickly? Are you linking your pages to other relevant and useful pages on your site and keeping your user on your website? Is there a high average number of pages and time spent on your website per session?
Always think about the user first. If a link isn’t helpful or useful to them don’t add it!
The more links you can add which are relevant to other pages on your website, the more votes you are giving to these other webpages in terms of page rank.
This not only helps your sites UX scoring but also how valuable a search engine deems a page on your site you’re linking to (the more internal links, the more valuable).
The more you can improve the internal linking, on-page experience, and clarity and relevance of your search results, the better your site will rank over the longer-term.
I hope you found these SEO tips useful for what to focus on during the coronavirus pandemic. Whether you focus on e-commerce or B2B, as digital marketers it’s important to react in this situation quickly to shift your resources and strategies into SEO where you will see the most return over the longer term.
Re-shifting your strategy should save you money, improve the value of your time and set you up for success in the future. I’d love to hear any questions or comments you have below. Look after each other.
