By SEO Strategies for B2B Companies
Coronavirus or COVID-19 has made the headlines in the news for the past few weeks, especially because it managed to spread worldwide so strong and so fast, putting our health at risk and changing deeply our lives and working conditions. More companies are adopting a remote working strategy to keep their employees safe from Coronavirus and to ensure business continuity. But how deep is the impact of COVID-19 on your business?
Coronavirus is changing the consumer business world
With the newly enforced quarantine measures and restrictions, a shift in consumer behavior is unavoidable. Major retailers in China like Starbucks, Nike, and Apple had temporarily shuttered their stores, while online grocery sales grew by 215% during a 10-day period between late January and early February.
A report from Nielsen shows that in the US, 47.2% of people avoid shopping centers and malls and 32.7% avoid any type of physical store but these numbers are expected to increase even more if the virus outbreak worsens.
Although most people are staying at home now, their basic needs remain unchanged: they still need food, water, and medical supplies, they try to continue their lifestyles as before the outbreak with healthy meals and fun family activities. This is the opportunity. The challenge is that they need to find all of these products online.
How is SEO a gamechanger in this messy situation?
With most companies struggling to find solutions to ensure business continuity during this crisis situation, some of them find themselves confronted with the tough decision of pulling back on their marketing and SEO spend. While that’s understandable, is it wise to make such a decision now?
Just take a moment to have a complete overview of the shifts that are happening on the market right now. Some of your competitors are reducing their SEO budgets but how does this translate more specifically? It’s simple: their engagement drops, their publishing cadence slows, they lose traction across social media channels...in other words, all the long hours and money invested over time to build qualitative processes and workflows, to carefully segment a target audience and create a customer base, not to mention the constant optimization of content to rank well for search engines...all these long-term efforts will be lost, most likely for good.
This opens a strong growth opportunity for companies that have a long-term digital mindset and that want to be ahead of the game when this crisis situation will end. Because it is not going to last forever. So instead of pulling back on your SEO efforts and follow the same downward path as your competitors, you can actually gain a competitive advantage over them by boosting your SEO visibility. Optimizing your website for search engines is one of the most important steps you can take during this crisis situation, to make sure your customers will be able to find you online, and what’s even more important, to make sure you will be their top choice.
Is your website traffic dropping? Do you want more visibility on the search engines? At NNC Services we have a team of SEO experts that will help you adjust your strategy to keep your competitive edge over your competitors.
Who can use SEO to overcome COVID-19 business challenges?
During these critical circumstances created by Coronavirus, ensuring business continuity is on every company’s daily agenda. The entire business world is struggling and while retail and tourism sectors have been hit particularly hard, other industries like healthcare, pharma, eCommerce or technology have seen a spike growth in the customer demand for their products and services.
This increased demand brings along growth in new business opportunities for companies that are expanding their services or just starting to digitize their business. What does this mean? New entrants on the market will use SEO to optimize their website and to get a top ranking in the search engine. This is just another reason for you to up your SEO initiatives and to get a competitive edge on the market before you miss this unique chance.
The time to act is now! When boosting your SEO visibility, your business remains on the minds of your current customers and gets on the radar of future ones. While adapting your SEO strategy to the new critical context created by COVID-19, remember that you are in a long-term game and immediate results might not be visible right away. However, by keeping an active online presence during this pandemic situation, you can definitely expect to get good exposure when the economy will improve.
What services should be targeted in lead generation campaigns during the COVID-19 outbreak?
What services are booming right now, benefiting from this pandemic outbreak? First of all, most employees are working remotely right now which means that they need to have a secure Internet connection, a mobile device, and remote access to their work station. This opens the market for businesses that provide:
- Cloud computing services;
- Video conferencing platforms;
- Online project management tools;
- VPN account services;
- Anti-virus and anti-malware software, and so on.
As mentioned before, although they are working from home and keep isolated for their own safety as much as possible, people still need to satisfy their most basic needs: eating and drinking. This boosts eCommerce simply because online ordering keeps people inside the house and safe from outside Coronavirus-related concerns. In order to avoid human contact as much as possible, delivery companies are testing drones delivery, so one lead generation campaign could target drone producers.
Can you think of other industries that are less impacted during the COVID-19 outbreak period? Because these are the sectors where you should focus all of your SEO and marketing efforts, tapping into their unlocked potential.
- Software as a Service (SaaS);
- Gaming (entertainment);
- Industrial cleaning and supplies;
- Delivery meal services;
- Online training tools;
- Live streaming platforms.
We appreciate that all of these changes might seem overwhelming, which is why the NNC Services team is ready to support the business community by providing a free 1-hour online SEO consulting session via Skype, Zoom, phone or any other remote communication platform.
