Despite currently living in uncertain times with lockdowns and restrictions, one thing for sure is that in the scheme of things, COVID-19 is a short term thing that will not be around forever. With a vaccine almost being readily available to inoculate those most vulnerable to the disease, it’s important that this second lockdown is utilised to create marketing strategies that will help to drive business forward as soon as possible. In fact, this second lockdown is the ideal time to implement an SEO strategy, putting businesses in a prime position to hit the ground running as we reach the other side of the pandemic.
Whether your business has a specialist in-house that runs your SEO or you opt for an SEO agency in London, it’s important that you have an SEO strategy in place to implement.
Online Shopping
The online presence of a business has never been as important than now. With many people restricted to staying at home or unable to visit certain shops, they have turned to more online shopping and internet browsing. As business has been significantly lower this year for many companies, now is the perfect time to enhance their online presence. SEO can help to gain organic visibility by ranking for relevant and transactional keywords at the top of Google, thus increasing the amount of traffic that is driven to the website and in turn improving the conversion rate too.
Long Term
As you know, SEO isn’t something that just happens overnight and takes time to build up and become established. In the majority of cases this can take months, but sometimes even years. Businesses need to gain trust with Google by showing the search engine that they are authoritative and experienced in their industry sector.
If a business decides to stop SEO, then a few weeks or months down the line, rankings will start to fall, which will also impact traffic and leads. This will have an overall effect on all the previous SEO work that has already been implemented.
Businesses need to keep momentum, a competitive edge and stabilised rankings. Once COVID-19 has passed, businesses will benefit from being in a strong position, especially against competitors that stopped SEO work during lockdown.
Algorithm Updates
Google rolls out hundreds of algorithm updates every year, so SEO strategies need to be adaptable. This also means that they need to be continually updated to ensure that they stay in line with SEO best practices and don’t fall behind.
Adaptations to the SEO strategy will need to be thought through and implemented to stay up to date with the latest algorithm update and ensure that ranking positions don’t drop significantly or at all. During this second lockdown, it’s important that an SEO strategy is implemented and maintained, as those who take their eye off the ball in SEO are sure to see a fall in their rankings.
Time To Refresh Content
By updating content or refreshing it, Google takes note of this and could alter the ranking positions in the SERP. Therefore, in order to increase your rankings, regularly update content, so that the search engine will resasses the current position on its index.
Updating and posting regular blog posts is also beneficial for both the audience and Google. New content will encourage users to visit the site to read the posts as part of their daily or weekly routine.
A second lockdown is the perfect time to update all of the content across the site, ensuring that pages are well optimised with relevant target keywords. This should include page titles, H1s and H2s, as well as the content itself.
Make It User Friendly
You can also use the second lockdown to take a look at the UX of the site and how easy it is for users to navigate around it. UX is becoming more and more of a ranking factor. Fortunately, there are plenty of steps that can be taken to make the site more user friendly for users and decrease the bounce rate. From altering the design, to enhancing page loading speed and implementing CTAs and internal links across the site, these are a number of ways to improve UX across the website.
This second lockdown is actually ideal for implementing or maintaining an SEO strategy. Remember SEO is a long term process, which must be regularly updated and checked to ensure that the site is continuing to adhere to best practices and guidelines from recent algorithms.
