In developing your goals and aspirations as a business, having to navigate a worldwide pandemic was likely not even a remote consideration. Regardless of how prepared a business may be, having a potential stoppage or market recession is daunting for everyone. What does this mean for your digital marketing strategy during a pandemic? Many industries find key competition reducing marketing spend in an effort to weather the storm. This tactic creates a unique vulnerability to their established rankings and can be capitalized upon by investing in marketing efforts like SEO. While your competitors neglect their visibility, you can pounce on the opportunity to bridge the gap and stake your claim on the market. The experts are saying that we won’t get back to a normal way of life until the end of next year. That means, you still have over a year to take advantage. In this article, you’ll understand how to increase your traffic, leverage your website to grow, and the expected returns an SEO investment can generate. 
COMPETITIVE SEO ACTIVITY
The state of the economy during a pandemic actually presents many opportunities for business owners in relation to their competition:
- Pulling Funding – With doubt in the market, it would be easier to stockpile money and “weather the storm”. Who can blame those who take this action? It is a less risky play after all. Retracting resources for marketing opens a void for hungry businesses with the foresight to fill. With some competition scaling back and internet traffic surging, now may be the perfect time to invest in SEO.
- More Opportunity – We have worked with clients in some of the most competitive markets in their respective areas (Legal, Home Services, Etc.). While these ultra-competitive spaces may have been out of reach in the past, depending on the efforts of competition currently, you may have much less barrier to entry to gain a foothold in the space.
- Lean Adaptation – Your customer’s needs always come first as a provider. During a pandemic, it is important to relate to the perspective of those customers and do what you can to make their interaction with your product or service available online. For instance, if you are a personal trainer, come up with workouts people can do from their homes and provide a video that your prospective and current clients can watch. There might be new, actionable keywords that can bring new leads through your website. Taking this initiative gives your website visitors the indication that you see the opportunity and are catering to your services to their desires.
- Online Presence – SEO helps your customers find you first. Since you can expect online traffic to remain augmented for a period of time, your online presence will rarely be so important. To put it in perspective, online retailers gained an extra $107 billion so far in 2020.
SEO AS AN OPPORTUNITY
Knowing what you know now, it seems the opportunity is there to boost yourself into markets you didn’t think were possible and add new viable customers. How do you do it?
- Do More – With your competition scaling back, now is the time to do more link building and more content production. With your content production, it’s important to center it around what your customers are asking and what they need. SEO is a game where what you do today will matter tomorrow. Build those links, consider keywords folks are searching, write some blogs. If you are stuck at home, there is no better time to focus on your website and online presence as a whole.
- New Services – As changes to the economy happen, you may look to expand your services or offerings. It is up to you to find out how you can adapt and provide it for your customers. Once you are able to find out what that service is, build out a page on your website with supporting content. Make sure those new pages are interlinked between other pages on your site and include relevant keywords to support your intended rankings.
- Hire a Professional – If you are feeling less than enthused about writing a few 800-word blogs or do not know where to start with keyword research, hire a professional SEO company, like Firestarter SEO, to execute some of these items for you.
NOW IS THE TIME TO GET RANKED
With online traffic still skyrocketing, your presence is now more important than ever. If you are a window provider, your customers may not be calling you for window replacement, but they are doing research to figure out how to fix the three windows they have noticed leaks in since they have been home so much more than usual. Your customers are still out there looking for you, and if they aren’t today, they will be tomorrow.
“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”
– Steve Jobs
