How To Adapt Your SEO Strategy During COVID-19

The world has changed drastically in the last few months. Unless you've been living under a rock, you already know that.

The impact COVID-19 has had on businesses and the economy may ripple out for months or years to come. What do these changes mean for business owners? Do you cut back on all marketing to save money? Batten the hatches and hope this will all blow over? Or, do you dive in and look for ways to adjust your current SEO strategies to make sure your company comes back stronger than ever when the storm passes?

The reality is, putting a stop to all marketing during COVID-19 might as well be a death sentence for your business. But you probably don't have the resources to invest thousands of dollars in long-term ROI strategies. So, what can you do?

Here are seven SEO strategies you can use to adjust your current approach and better use the resources you already have.

Every business should have a page on their website about COVID-19, particularly those in essential businesses.

Here is an example of a dedicated COVID-19 page from the amazing team at Buffer.

Searches for COVID-19 area are on the rise, and a page dedicated to the impact of the virus will help capture that increase in traffic — and build trust with your audience.

What should you cover on your COVID-19 page? The content will vary based on your industry, but most businesses should include:

Link to key pages on your site from your COVID pages, such as an FAQ page or contact page. Starbucks, for example, regularly updates its COVID-19 page with information about how they are reacting to the situation, with links to internal pages where customers can find more information about their local stores.

The world as we know it has changed — and so has our search behavior. Most kids are engaged in online learning, many office workers are working from home, and gyms are still closed in most states.

To stay on top, your site needs to adjust target key terms to match new search behavior. How do you know what terms to target? Head to Google Search Console, and look for the Performance tab.

Select the last three months, and compare it to a three month period before traffic slowed down. Then, look at your impressions — specifically for changes in impressions. This will show you what keywords users are searching for more during the current crisis.

Once you've identified keywords with potential, take a look at clicks. If you see keywords with few or no clicks, can you develop new content to address those terms? Or, can you revamp current content to address those terms? For example, an eCommerce store might earn more traffic by changing a page about an "adjustable standing desk" to target "work from home desk." Or a clothing retailer might find that a page about "loungewear" sees more traffic when it is called "work from home clothing."

I used this tactic at Leadfeeder when developing this piece of content 8 Email Templates to Help SDRs During COVID-19.

A similar topic from this previous article targeting salespeople with email templates was already performing well!

So, I tweaked the vision to tailor this to what Leadfeeder's customers want. I used the data I gathered from Google Search Console to create the new piece of content.

This new content 8 Email Templates to Help SDRs During COVID-19 has generated over 200+ MQLs in less than 30 days. And, has driven over 10,000+ new users to Leadfeeder's website.

Google likes fresh content. This means if you want to capture more traffic, you need relevant, in-depth content. Yes, you could spend a ton of time creating new content. But fresh content does not always mean new content.

Instead of investing time and resources into creating new content, make the most of the content you've already published by revamping older content.

The team at Codeless revamped their content and increased average session duration by 281.05% and reduced post promotion CPC by 70%. It sounds like a big job, right?

Consider using a tool like Market Muse, which compares your current content to other pages ranking for the same or similar key terms and gives you tips to improve your current content.

Here's a peek at the complete dashboard. The numbered circles are the top pages ranking for the target key term Marketmuse reviews.

The Topic heading lists key terms and topics that should be covered — including which pages cover those topics. Adding topics from this list to your content will improve relevancy and result in higher ranking.

Updating older content is a great way to get in Google's sights. But, there's only so much updating you can do. And cranking out new content is time-consuming and tedious, especially at a time when your employees are already spread thin.

So, what can you do?

Find ways to get more out of the content you already have by repurposing content that is doing well into other formats.

For example, you could:

Many businesses rely on trade shows or conferences to generate a large portion of their revenue. Those events are off the table — for months or possibly even years. Which makes now the perfect time to capitalize on the expertise of your product experts or trade show sales staff to create long-form, evergreen content. After all, they likely know more about your products or services than anyone else.

The problem is, finding the right topics to cover can be a huge challenge — one you might not have the energy or resources to tackle right now.

Serpstat might be the answer you've been looking for.

This tool take over a lot of the manual research that goes into creating long-form content so that you can focus more on the actual writing. The dashboard gives you information about search volume, keyword research, and what other content is ranking well for a given search term.

This information makes it far easier to create long-form content that will rank well in the search engines.

Here are a few ideas for creating long-form content:

Building out a robust library of content can be pivotal to building an SEO strategy that will put you ahead in the future when search behavior and consumer spending normalizes.

FAQ pages are beneficial for several reasons — they can reduce customer service queries and increase your chances of landing Google's coveted Featured Snippets.

Now is the time to review your FAQ pages.

Here is an example of COVID-19 FAQ page from Aetna.

And, another from Verizon.

Determine if the language needs to be adjusted to reflect changes due to COVID-19 and add new questions and answers for topics.

I know, I know. Paid ads aren't exactly SEO. But using paid ads to drive traffic can increase your search rankings. And now is a really good time to invest in paid ads.

Here's why:

The cost of paid ads is down in most industries, but internet usage has risen dramatically due to stay at home orders. In fact, 75 percent of consumers reported they are on social media daily.

That means you can pay less to reach more people than ever before.

The way the world uses the internet has changed and many businesses may not survive this pandemic.

Businesses that want to succeed must change their approach to SEO and adapt their marketing strategies — not by cutting back on marketing but by finding ways to do more with the resources they already have.