Up your SEO efforts in a down economy
As the COVID-19 crisis unfolds around the world, being proactive in the face of an economic crisis is critical for any business.
And when the profits are down, businesses don’t want to spend money on long term strategies.
Today, for many businesses, it’s about survival.
Survival means keeping the lights on and doing more with less.
Hiring stops. Contracts are re-negotiated. Discretionary spending is avoided. Investments in growth-oriented initiatives are de-prioritized. But, the business must go on.
The marketer's challenge is to retain customers and at the same time reduce the cost of new customer acquisition.
We have already seen conferences and events world-wide canceled and replaced by virtual events. As per recent stats, paid ads are getting crushed due to COVID-19. Google and Facebook have seen weakening demand for ad placements.
Organic search has gained importance over other marketing channels.
Here are some reasons why you should continue your SEO strategy during these challenging times for your business.
1. Cost-effective
When it comes to organic search vs paid search, ROI is an undeniable point of discussion. It doesn’t matter whether it’s organic search, paid search or social, you want a return on your efforts.
Paid search campaign performs for as long as you invest in it. Once you stop, so do the results.
While the paid media and advertising budgets slashed due to the cost-cutting measures amid the pandemic, the focus is now shifting to improving organic search.
Even though More than 90% of online experiences start with a search engine, resulting in around 3.5 billion daily searches the competition to rank for the first page is huge — and that’s only on Google.
But, it’s not the same in case of your videos.
This means that even new sites and small sites can compete on equal footing with larger and more established players. Publishers who are too small or too new to even consider traditional SEO can still be taking advantage of Video SEO opportunities.
Here is an example of our own video, that was posted in December 2019, ranking on the first page of google search results.
In fact, Forrester Research found that videos were 53 times more likely than traditional web pages to receive an organic first-page ranking.
2. Adaptable
Irrespective of the type of business whether small or big, SEO can help in improving the business just by focusing on targeted keywords and engaging customer base through content optimization.
Strengthen your site by creating pages that target keywords that deal with your industry and your services. You can also see what keywords bring users to this page and your search ranking on those keywords.
3. Measurable
SEO is considered difficult to track but there are dozens of Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) that marketers can use to gauge the success of their SEO efforts.
#Ranking Factors
- Search Visits
- Total Visits
- Direct Visits
- Global Rank
- Time on Site
- Bounce Rate
- Page Views
Leverage the power of Google Analytics and rank tracking, heat map, site speed analyzers, and other analytic tools to amplify strengths and correct weaknesses on your website.
Here is a study by SimilarWeb on Traffic and Engagement Metrics and their correlation to Google Rankings.
4. Web Traffic Generation
Videos have now become the primary way to reach customers. Therefore, marketers must expand the SEO strategy to include video. A single video on a website can generate a lot of useful keywords and tags that can boost search engine rankings. This means new and unseen traffic to your website.
To have your videos to pop up on search results, Video SEO can be done following the best practices listed by google.
Videos are dominant over the other traditional listings and let you invite higher traffic to your website.
Make those marketing videos to work for you with Video SEO
We hope that COVID-19 passes soon with minimal impact on people and until that happens, we hope that you stay safe and follow the guidelines given by WHO.
Conclusively with a well-planned and executed SEO strategy, businesses can retain customers, increase sales, stay relevant and successfully emerge from this slowdown.
I’d love to hear your experiences — have you seen an uptick in organic search? Please let us know in the comments below.
Want your videos to be easily found by search engines like Google?
Try our Free Video SEO Tool and start ranking for your videos now.
