How SEO Has Helped Businesses Survive COVID-19

When the Coronavirus broke out earlier this year, there was a massive wave of panic that surged both the nation and the world.

For instance, as the world went into lockdown, brands responded by reducing their ad spend in a bid to cut back on marketing expenses. According to the World Economic Forum, ad spend was down 9% on average across Europe by June while the UK and Germany pulled spending back by a larger 12% each.

When a crisis hits, there are generally 2 ways in which businesses respond.

1. Crisis Mode

This method means that brands tend to go into ‘crisis mode’ themselves in a bid to cut costs and survive as long as they have to

2. Opportunity Mode

This method sees brands looking to ‘seize opportunities’, whether that’s pivoting or taking advantage of all of those businesses who opted for ‘Crisis Mode’ (which was most businesses). While there were loads of brands cutting costs left, right and center, there was one marketing strategy that had businesses intrigued due to its long term, cost effective nature – Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. In fact, here’s some of the key points demonstrating how and why SEO became the marketing method of choice since Covid-19:

• SEO is a low-cost, high-ROI strategy
• Organic search drives long-term traffic
• Local search is crucial as lockdown encourages people to look closer to home
• SMBs benefit from desire to support smaller businesses
• People turn to search engines amid uncertainty
• COVID-19 search trends generate new opportunities

As a low-cost strategy, SEO provides a key channel for brands that want to maintain an online presence while reducing their ad spend, which is a common tactic during financial crises. Unlike paid advertising, such as Google Ads, which stops when you stop funding it – SEO continues to keep and build its momentum over time. This has been especially important during Covid-19 lockdown whereby local businesses have had to close their physical doors, whilst being able to keep their online wheels turning – not to mention the surge in local Google searches during this time! Google has also responded swiftly by making several updates to their Google My Business platform, giving businesses the opportunity to inform customers as to their current Covid-19 status. There’s no denying that Covid-19 has accelerated trends and changed the world, perhaps even for good. But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. The Coronavirus has opened up new and profitable avenues for businesses and has even highlighted the importance of local community and support. SEO plays right into this, as businesses can target niche categories in their locally targeted areas to see increased web traffic, enquiries and income. If your business would like to reap the benefits of SEO, then contact DigitUX. We’ve helped many Australian businesses through Covid-19 already and are continually here to help keep the wheels turning now and into the future.