Adjust Your SEO Efforts in Challenging Times

SEO efforts are more important than ever during crisis times. Viral outbreaks, economic recessions, and global panic in the face of these things can muddy the waters. This situation is a perfect storm of challenges for businesses and makes marketing efforts more difficult when standard solutions won’t always work. Such challenging times often require innovative approaches.

Challenging the Standards

Internet marketing efforts often follow formulas. These standards are tried and tested, and they typically follow an expected pattern of effort to reward. Unfortunately, they can also crumble in the face of sudden upheavals.
Challenging times are unexpected, such as the recent Coronavirus outbreak. Suddenly, a company’s standard SEO practices may prove inadequate. Millions of people rush to find out more information, flood the airwaves with fear-driven questions, comments, and answers, and almost overnight there’s a deluge of good and bad information.
If you try to stick with your stock-standard SEO approach, your efforts are doomed to be lost amid the din. You need to change your SEO efforts to meet the times, and be ready for any fast adjustments in the future. This way you can minimize the damage and set yourself up less for crisis management and more for adaptable internet marketing efforts.

SEO Versus the World

SEO is a sustainable marketing practice. The investment in good SEO is well worth the payoff, especially compared to traditional marketing campaigns. But if the world is suffering a recession due to unforeseen circumstances, how can SEO help you?
Advertisements can be expensive. SEO is relatively low cost in comparison, even paying an outside agency to help you optimize your SEO for the recession times. Optimized efforts also account for the X factors of times of sudden change, allowing you to quickly shift your focus to meet a new challenge.
To use the viral outbreak of 2020 as an example, every website that can put the word “virus” into its pages is certainly doing so. If you want to stand out, you need quality information as part of your SEO. For example, simply telling people that you’re offering a discount for out-of-town residents at your hotel because of the virus, is not enough. Your efforts should focus on offering solutions, safety, emphasizing your thorough disinfection protocols, your offers to those who are stuck out of town or trying to visit family.
People are looking for safety and comfort of familiarity in unfamiliar times. Offering loyalty discounts, clear information about how your company is taking the virus seriously and acts to deal with it, these things are invaluable to SEO in crisis times.

The Tactical Approach

In a time of global recession and widespread panic, it’s important to stay positive. Humans have survived as long as they have because, despite what movies say, most people come together during times of crisis. You should tailor your approach not to capitalize on fear but to encourage adaptation.
Clarity is key. One of the first things many customers will look for is how your company is responding to the crisis. If you are clearly communicating how you perceive the situation, and your company’s commitment to helping its customers through the trying times, your efforts will be noticed.
Know that customers will be asking questions. Aim to meet those questions upfront as much as possible. Well-maintained FAQs and statements about the virus are a good way to get in front of these questions because many of your customers will have them. Efficiently laying out your company’s response to the challenge of the pandemic will both serve to reassure your consumer base as well as free up some of your internal resources.

Also recognize that during these times, while certain sites (such as travel sites) experience reduced traffic, social isolation means increased traffic for a large variety of other sites. Now is a good time to offer deals on shipping, along with a guarantee of safe shipping practices. Presenting both a friendlier online experience as well as secure access to some of the commodities people take for granted is imperative.

The Practical Approach

SEO is cheaper and more cost-effective than full marketing campaigns. During a recession, you will need to aim for as much financial efficiency as possible.

In crisis times like these, people are going to be less tolerant of delays and difficulties. If your path to purchase is needlessly complex, second thoughts are going to kill your conversions. While panic-buying certain supplies occur in the initial phases of the outbreak, people are considering what they need rather than impulse buying.

“Need” is a concept that changes meaning in this kind of recession. The viral outbreak is forcing people to stay indoors and limit contact with the public as much as possible. Many customers are going to have a need that they can no longer easily meet because of the isolation. Offering a product or service that helps increase comfort levels while stuck in one’s own home is how you keep the visitors you receive.
If you want to convert them, you must emphasize the value even in these times. Do people need the discounted movies and games you offer? Not from a survival standpoint, but the market is full of families stuck inside together on advised, if not mandated, lockdown. Your products offer families in times of stress entertainment that helps them keep calm and happy.

Flexible SEO accounts for the fact that this will not be a permanent situation. Continuing this example, those games and the family fun times built around them don’t suddenly lose meaning once the pandemic has died down. Make sure you communicate the continued “Family Game Night” value your offerings will bring long after isolation ends.

Focus and Flexibility

Certain segments of your SEO market may suffer during these crisis times. Combat this with a clear focus on your company’s persistent value offerings. Laser focus on specific targets—such as how membership in your game subscription service gives gamers more options in a time where they are limited socially—can easily shift into a more flexible approach once the recession has passed. Your platform becomes a way of connecting people through shared fun, a fact you can emphasize in different ways even after the crisis is gone.

Proper SEO ready to meet new and unexpected challenges is supremely flexible in this way. You can adjust your focus temporarily, then expand to include your standard targets afterward. This kind of adaptable SEO helps secure your business—and your customers—in times of economic crisis, recession, and any other challenges that arise in the market.