4 Tips For Maintaining Your Web Presence During A Pandemic

As the COVID-19 crisis continues to evolve, the question we keep hearing from our clients over and over is, “What should we do about our digital marketing?” Although we don’t recommend that you throw away all of your planning that took place in January, we urge you to re-evaluate your marketing strategy and shift as necessary.

Use these 4 tips to maintain your web presence and audit your digital marketing strategy to keep business moving forward.

Update all the things. 

Make sure all of your platforms clearly tell your customers how to reach you and do business with you. 

Google my business: Google My Business is a must if you want a strong local SEO presence. If your business does not already have an account, now is the time to set one up. Once your profile is set up, update your business hours, contact information, and offerings. Also, some good news — Google just announced that businesses can set their status as “Temporarily Closed” without negatively impacting their SEO presence.

Website: As states continue to implement social distancing, the most important interaction potential customers have with your business is on your website. Consider making these updates:

• Add a temporary announcement bar that provides time relevant information
• Update your contact information and hours
• Add an online shopping cart
• Include information about how your company is responding to the crisis 

Social Media: Social media is more important than ever. Facebook and Instagram have seen a 40% increase in usage due to COVID-19. Review your scheduled content for the next few months to determine whether or not they are still appropriate and relevant. If not, create some new content. Need some inspiration? Check out this blog for tips on managing your social media presence during times of crisis. 

Invest in your SEO.

Business slower than normal right now? Consider this an opportunity to work on your long term goals. Investing in SEO tactics like rewriting title tags and meta descriptions now can pay huge dividends in a post-recession market. Ask our clients at Darigold — they saw a 109% click increase on their About page after implementing optimized titles and meta descriptions.

Remember, SEO is never a short term strategy. It can take months to see shifts in search results, so set your business up to come out of this period of time with a strong organic presence. 

Also, keep in mind that in an effort to continue providing the most relevant results, search engines like Google will likely push a lot of algorithm changes and updates. Companies that adapt to these changes will reap the resulting traffic. 

Want to learn more about SEO? A good resource is the Blogging For Business course from Ahrefs. This is a great course that covers everything from the basics of content marketing to optimizing blog posts for strategic keywords. Best of all, right now the course is free!

Re-evaluate your paid ads.

You might be tempted to cut your paid online ads right now — don’t. If your budget is tighter due to the current climate, consider this; instead of cutting your ads campaign completely, narrow down your keywords to those that are relevant to a more convertible audience. By removing your top of the funnel keywords you can reduce ad spend and remain competitive for your high-value keywords. 

And remember, other companies are facing the same ad spend decisions as you. If those businesses cut their ad spend for keywords that you were previously competing on, you’re going to see better ad placements and higher click through rates. 

Get started with keyword research using Ubersuggest. Use this resource to conduct in-depth keyword research and analysis on a budget. This SEO tool features a lot of the same functionality as its paid competitors and the company owner, Neil Patel just announced that there will be even more free functionality to come!

Use browser add-ons to maintain accurate analytics. 

As more people work from home, you may notice issues with internal traffic skewing your website data. In a traditional office environment, it’s easy to filter out internal traffic in Google Analytics by using office IP addresses. Unfortunately, that method renders useless when employees work from home. Have everyone in your company use the Google Analytics Opt-out browser add-on to ensure your website analytics data stays accurate. This effectively filters out internal traffic.

For more ideas on how you can set your business up for success during a time of crisis, check out more strategy articles.