How to Change Your Game to Win in SEO During the Pandemic 

By  //  February 23, 2021

While marketing actions are slowed down because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the services concerned should work on their SEO. Search engine research is an indicator of consumer intention and behavior, and the COVID-19 crisis is having a considerable impact on search behavior, consumer mobility, media consumption habits, supply chains, and budgets. 

We have therefore taken the time to note a few tips that will boost your SEO performance.

Consumers, businesses, and the Covid-19 pandemic. 

In a recent survey, one out of three consumers indicated that the Coronavirus’s appearance had already changed their purchasing behavior. 47.2% of internet users questioned said that they currently avoid shopping centers.

Marketing channels, such as online paid advertising, are already seeing their budgets shrink. Google search ads lost 7% of their impressions between 13 January 2020 and 9 March 2020.

On the other hand, organic search ads have increased by more than 300% between 19 January 2020 and 19 March 2020.

With these changes, SEO and content marketing professionals have the opportunity to increase their impact, creating content that stimulates conversions in the short term and builds their identity in the long term.

What are the SEO actions to take during this period of Coronavirus?

Analyze your web traffic data

Google Analytics makes it very easy to analyze your website traffic. If you haven’t set it up yet, just go to Google analytics to launch this powerful tool.

However, if your website is of a large size and has an e-commerce function, I suggest you contact an expert.

You will have a set of measures at your disposal, and in this period of crisis, you will need to pay particular attention to the nine elements listed below:

Pageviews: This is the number of times visitors have accessed each page of your website. A single visitor can accumulate many page views if he or she visits a page several times.

Visits: Here, you get the total number of visits to your site, regardless of the number of pages viewed by each visitor.

Unique visitors: This measure provides the number of unique visitors to your website. Each person counts as a unique visit, even if they visit your site more than once.

Average duration rate: It tells you how much time visitors spend on your site once they arrive. Don’t worry if the duration seems short. The average time is usually three to five minutes, sometimes less.

Bounce rate: It refers to the number of people who leave your site immediately after landing there, often when they realize that this is not what they were looking for. The average bounce rate is between 50 and 59%.

Percentage of new visits: This measure gives you the percentage of traffic coming from new visitors. If you are looking for new prospects, this number should increase. If you are targeting regular visitors, on the other hand, this figure should be lower.

Real-time traffic: Here, you can see how many people are on your site in real-time at a given moment. This is particularly useful when you launch a promotion and want to see what its immediate impact is.

Channel Acquisition: This tool allows you to see how much of your traffic comes from your different channels and which platforms send you the most visitors. The goal is to have about 50% of your traffic coming from social networks and 50% coming organically from search engines.

AdWords metrics: Connect your Google Analytics to your AdWords campaign to see how your online advertising campaigns perform.

 Proactively manage your web presence.

Google considers your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness in determining your ranking in its results rankings. The keyword here is “reliability.”

Again, the more trust you establish through your content, the more likely users will click on your content in Google’s SERPs. That’s why managing your brand’s online presence is essential during this period. Undated or inaccurate information can be confusing and even harmful to consumers and, therefore, to your image.

Here are some online reputation tips that will help you during COVID-19:

Update your sitemap: This ensures that Google displays accurate information about your business in this fast-changing environment and that users see only the most up-to-date information. If you are an e-commerce company, help meet consumer expectations by updating your schema.org, your products’ availability to provide real-time information.

Update your Google My Business page: Keep your customers informed about changes to your business activities, such as changes in business hours, by updating your Google My Business page.

Keep an eye on your Google Search Console: Web traffic, especially traffic from organic search, is a very important indicator of the changing demand for your products and services. Peaks or decreases in traffic can tell you what type of information is most important to your customers and can influence your response.

Monitor research and publications on social networks: monitor topics related to COVID-19 that are relevant to your business. Use research data to understand the research and audience’s intent and social network publications to analyze market trends and consumer needs.

In times of Coronavirus, you have to reassure and reassure again and again.

Confidence is an important success factor in these times of Coronavirus, however, hackers are taking advantage of the current situation. They use malware to promote discount codes and Coronavirus special offers. A promotional sales campaign for Apple products had the sole purpose of collecting your personal and sensitive information.

Cybercriminals also use the brand name of “trusted” companies in phishing attacks. Even trusted companies such as the World Health Organization were hijacked by hackers to establish their credibility. As security is a top priority, here are some tips on how to make your website more secure:

Monitor your logs for exploration errors. If you are an SEO professional, you know that this analysis can help you identify how search engine robots access your website. The analysis can also reveal if spambots are trying to infiltrate your site.

Secure your site with SSL.

Update any plugins or applications you use. Hackers tend to look for vulnerabilities in older plugins or tools.

For SEO specialists, cyber security doesn’t stop at HTTPS. It is essential to take preventive measures to secure your digital assets today. A hacker can have a permanent negative impact on your SEO efforts. Protect your website for the future.

Rejuvenate Your Backlinks

Links from one website to another website are a way for Internet users to obtain information easily while browsing the web. These links, also known as backlinks, in most cases they impact the SEO performance of the site to which they point.

In other words, backlinks represent one of the 200 positioning/ranking factors taken into account by Google among the 200 positioning factors it uses for SEO. Backlinks are expensive, and they are not easy to build. Some of your backlinks received may point to pages that no longer exist. Be sure to redirect these pages in error in order to transfer the “link juice” transmitted by the backlinks to existing pages.

Check the impact of your publications.

If you have already defined a publication strategy and have already communicated, it is time to analyze the results and understand Internet users’ needs and demands. It is important to show empathy and compassion for your audience in times of crisis.

Some companies have completely revised their communication policy, and in order not to offend their audience, they have adapted their voice tone to be more reassuring and make fewer references to gatherings and physical contact.

As online research is an indicator of customer intent, SEO managers need to be more aware of consumer sensitivities. This is valuable information that SEO managers should share with other marketers in their organization.

During this period, SEO is more than technical SEO: it is also about being the customer’s voice throughout the organization. Focus on short term adaptation to give you a chance to build long-term brand equity.

Deal with Your Duplicate Content

Today, making too much duplicate content is punished by search engines. Google, in particular, has come up with a specific algorithm that acts to filter good and bad content: Google Panda. This is grafted into the indexing process and analyses your pages to check that they are of good quality, that they are not stolen, and at the same time… that they are not duplicated.

In other words, if Google Panda, while scanning your site, realizes that you have an endless number of copied and pasted pages, it will punish you. You could lose places or even, in rare cases, be expelled from the index for spam. Another penalty at Google is the manual penalty. In Google Webmaster tools, you can be notified that a penalty for Duplicate content has been registered against you. This penalty can be partial or total.

There is, of course, a psychological penalty for your users. If they realize that your site is a duplicate content factory, they will ignore you and give you a bad reputation. Clearly, you won’t see these users as often, they will get lost in the meanders of meaningless and repetitive content.

Solution: Using crawlers such as Screaming Frog, check that you do not have pages with too similar content and titles. 

Refresh Your Content

Google always appreciates fresh content. This is not new, but too often forgotten. Various studies have shown that relevant and engaging content is rewarded by search engines through increased visibility. Instead of always writing new content, why not take advantage of the existing content on your site?

Refresh the information, develop your ideas, ask yourself what can be optimized to improve the positioning of your page and the engagement of your visitors. In an effort to make its results pages more relevant, Google continually updates its algorithm, which results in a certain volatility in the positioning of your site.

One element taken into account by Google is the CTR on your result and the return rate. Updating the content of your pages will give you a greater chance of maintaining or winning positions on SERPs (Search Engine Results Page).

Optimize Your Alt Tags 

Optimizing your alt tag means optimizing your SEO. The keywords contained in the image ALT tag are taken into account for search engine positioning: this attribute helps Google to contextualize your content. Universal search is increasingly important.

Therefore, referencing your images in search engines becomes essential to be visible, and this can generate traffic to your website via Google Images, for example. The alt attribute is read orally by the screen reader for visually impaired people.

It will be the content displayed if your site is slowed down by any problem (server, slowness…), which makes it clear that this is supposed to tell the user what should be found instead of this image.