Faced with the current crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic, some eCommerce businesses are considering putting their online marketing strategies and internet presence on hold to cut costs.
However, at a time when internet use has soared, it’s important not to stop your marketing strategies, but to redesign them and focus on new goals. It’s true that the coronavirus threat is affecting us and uncertainty is very high, but the crisis will pass, and when we recover we need to be better positioned than ever.
Working for tomorrow
Implementing a search marketing strategy and working on SEO is essential to be ready for the post-coronavirus world. And now is the best time.
We probably have to accept that sales won’t match the same period last year, but that doesn’t mean we should drop all online activity; quite the opposite. Investing in your online store’s rankings will pay off in the medium to long term, and optimizing your website to improve its search engine rankings ensures your products reach customers when they search for them online.
6 keys to a strong SEO strategy
At Trilogi we suggest 6 factors to consider when defining a strong SEO strategy that can help you soften the impact of the coronavirus and come out stronger.
1. Know your audience
It’s essential to know and understand your potential customers perfectly. The more you know about your audience, the better. How they behave, what they’re interested in and what they’re not, which keywords they respond to… because only then can you fine-tune the most relevant keywords and content at any given time.
To do this, there are several tools that can help you define your target audience precisely:
- Buyer persona: sketching a profile of your ideal consumer will help you understand your customers better.
- Customer journey: looking at the stages potential consumers go through before buying can help you identify their interests and purchase barriers.
- Empathy map: this tool will help you understand what your customers really need and what they want you to offer them.
2. Define the keywords you want to rank for:
Keyword research is one of the most important parts of an SEO strategy. Research keywords, analyze their traffic and cost, and choose the most suitable ones. A good strategy is to group them by categories, services and/or products, so you know which keyword to target on each page of your website.
3. Improve your website’s usability:
Taking care of how your website looks, making it attractive, simple and intuitive to navigate on both desktop and mobile, is essential for SEO. A website’s usability not only improves the user experience but is also rewarded by Google. So make sure search engines can crawl your site, review your internal links and fix any broken ones.
It’s important to have a clear navigation structure, page headings that follow a hierarchy (H1, H2, H3), and properly optimized URLs and meta tags.
4. Create optimized content:
The success of an SEO strategy also depends on the quality of your website’s content. Offer original, visually appealing content that is specific and relevant to your audience. And if it can be multimedia, even better. Google prioritizes pages with images, videos or formatted text over those with plain text.
Besides giving us a strong brand image, content lets us capture our target audience’s attention and stand out from our main competitors.
5. Invest in link building:
Link building is an off-page SEO strategy that will increase your website’s visibility and traffic through organic rankings. The goal: getting linked from other relevant websites. The better the reputation or authority of the site linking to you, the more valuable that link is and the higher your website scores.
There are different ways to get quality backlinks pointing to your website, for example from your social media, through guest posting, by exchanging recommendations with other websites, via business directories… However, and most importantly, they must be external links from relevant pages directly related to your topic.
6. Measure your results:
Analyzing and measuring your results is essential to know whether the changes you’re making are effective and working. To do this, you have free tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
Monitor everything you can. Measure your website’s traffic, how long users stay, how many downloads they make, indexing status and anything else that helps you analyze how users interact with your site so you can keep optimizing it.
So, even if the current situation isn’t ideal or your physical store is closed, if you want the brightest possible future for your business, digital marketing now takes center stage.
And remember, SEO is constantly evolving. Investing in it keeps you ahead of every change without losing your rankings.
