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Covid-19, lockdowns and restrictions on business

Unfortunately, some businesses have not been able to open their doors since March with many more folding and going out of business, leaving a huge dent in our communities.

As Napoleon Hill says in ‘Think & Grow Rich’:

“Every Adversity, Every Failure, Every Heartbreak, Carries with It the Seed of An Equal or Greater Benefit”

And throughout Covid and regional/national lockdowns that seemed to be the case with some businesses who were able to pivot and making a big impression online and find away to continue trading despite the very difficult circumstances.

SEO – The superstar of digital marketing during COVID-19

One of the big superstars throughout Covid has been SEO

Whilst SEO isn’t something that happens overnight, those who were investing in SEO pre-Covid mainly saw some good improvement in their search engine rankings as Google rolled out two core algorithm updates.

Buying habits changed and along with that likely the face of our high streets.

Retailers had to quickly adapt and drive footfall online, the main way to do that was SEO.

During May 2020, Google released a core algorithm update which helped a number of sectors out and penalised some sectors such as Travel, property and health were all affected in a major way.

A more recent December 2020 update, although it was only on the 3rd December appears to show that bigger retailers such as Amazon and Littlewoods have been hit a little and that more local & smaller businesses have had a boost.

Seo has been vital as buyers flocked online – Or should we say Consumers flocked online – Whether that was to buy, research or just kick back and escape from lockdown for a short time – Being at the top of the search engines was never more important than this year.

Let’s take the manufacturing industry for example – they had supply chains disrupted, found it difficult to get their products on to shelves and their buyers were shut and so not ordering.

This led to manufacturing companies having to change their business model and instead of selling to wholesalers or distributors going direct to market, this meant a whole new web presence, selling direct to customers, taking payments, re-branding and cutting out 2-3 levels of their chain to sell direct.

With that huge change in strategy came the need to attract a new audience and so SEO became very important to reach that audience – That’s where Seo came in and with the December core Google algorithm update – This appears (at this early stage) to of very kind to these smaller retailers and helped to improve their visibility within the search results.

For those who were already doing SEO and had half decent SEO rankings anyway and continued doing Seo, then it’s very likely that they saw a boost in their search engine rankings, giving more visibility in the search engines and more vital traffic to their website.

Things you can do to help your SEO & ensure that you rank as high as possible in Google

*Rank for the right keywords – There’s no point ranking very high for keywords that bring you no traffic or they bring you the wrong traffic. This will result in vanity metrics such as high number of visits to your website but little to no conversions, and websites are all about conversions!

Make your website load quicker – Page speed is key to Google and the quicker that your website loads the better for your users. Whilst a fast-loading site doesn’t directly improve your website rankings, it helps indirectly and plays a bigger part of the user experience which in turn helps your Google rankings.

Give them a reason to stick around – If users find you in Google, visit your website and leave almost instantly, then that’s potentially because your content is all wrong for the users search intent or just not engaging at all. Make sure your content is relevant, use short & snappy headlines, use images, headers, bullet points, infographics and video to get your content across as easily as possible – you want people to engage, so use a mix and match of these methods to deliver your content to your users.

These are some good ways to boost your business.

You could also consult an SEO agency who will have a little more experience into SEO and how to get you ranking so if you find your SEO is treading water or not getting the search engine rankings that you require, it might be worth speaking to an SEO agency to help you out.

SEO – The superstar of digital marketing during COVID-19

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