How Small Business Can Recover During Covid - 19 With SEO

In times of crises or downturns, marketing budgets are often the first to get cut within a company.

This shouldn’t be the case.

Every business needs to set up a crisis recovery plan that will allow them to operate amid the current pandemic – and marketing, when done right, actually plays a big role on this.

Crisis: Connect, Adjust, Engage

Key channels: Website, SEO, Local, Content

In this phase, businesses should:

• Maintain website and increase digital relevance.
• Add COVID-related content – FAQs, your policies, banners.
• Ensure local listings and maps are updated.
• Start developing new content.

Recovery: Working in the New Normal

Key channels: Website, Paid Media, SEO, Email

During recovery, we listen to our customers in order to find out how to tune the business and figure out how to package what we’re offering to our customers in the most effective way.

This involves:

• Generating interest with unique offers.
• Targeted relaunch of paid media.
• Investing in SEO prioritizing schemas, voice, and technical health.
• Optimizing mobile with AMP and superior navigation.
• Amplifying omnichannel efforts with email.

Growth: Back in the Game

Key channels: Paid Media, Website, SEO

• Harvest content marketing efforts.
• Aggressively scale paid media presence.
• Leverage prospecting and lookalike modeling.
• Omnichannel synergies.

Crisis & Recovery: Focus on 5 Key Tactics

The crisis and recovery phases should focus on:

• Offers
• Local
• FAQs & Voice
• Schemas
• AMP

1. Develop On-Point Offers

Start Planning & Testing Offers for Recovery

Some areas you can look at include:

• Service: Hours, video, delivery, in-home.
• Products: New menus, bundles.
• Incentives: Free trial, status, membership, subscription.
• Payment: Deferral, debit, credit, Venmo, Bitcoin.
• Messaging: Headlines, images, FAQs, CTAs.

2. Schemas

The way Google understands language is greatly assisted by schemas.

Schemas are a way to add a lot more information to your website without exposing it on your website to your customers.

Other relevant schemas:

• OpeningHoursSpecification
• FAQPage
• QAPage
• SearchResultsPage
• HowTo
• Breadcrumb
• Image

3. Local

Local listings and knowledge panels have high visibility.

Whether you are a location-based business, an enterprise or a corporate entity, there’s a huge opportunity when you keep your Google My Business (GMB) profiles updated.

4. AMP

Accelerated mobile pages (AMP) load faster leading to higher mobile visibility, engagement, and conversion.

AMP is Google’s format for enhancing the speed of the website. An AMP site has an image on Google’s Servers and results in fast user experience.

5. FAQs & Voice Solutions

You can also use frequently asked questions (FAQs) and voice search to increase visibility.

Crisis-stage FAQs complement evergreen FAQs.

There are three elements to ensure your FAQs get picked up.

• Create an FAQ content on your website that talks about the questions that you know the public is asking about you.
• Make sure your website is technically sound (i.e., check mobile site speed and schemas).
• In terms of voice search is you want to create actions and skills on Alexa and Google Assistant.

 

SUMMARY 

• Create and test new offers.
• Update local, publish Google posts.
• Launch or update FAQs.
• Deploy, fix, and update schemas.
• Use AMP on key pages.