13 Ways Businesses Can Use SEO & Marketing to Combat Coronavirus Impact

You should, at this point, be taking the safety precautions recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO). Many federal governments are stepping up with policies to protect their workers from the certain economic impacts of widespread self-isolation.

In Italy, one of the hardest-hit areas to date, the government negotiated an accord with banks for the suspension of mortgage payments, for example. And in Canada, where I live, the waiting period for unemployment benefits has been eliminated.

There are quite a few reputable resources to help employers and employees prepare for COVID-19, like this WHO guide.

For self-employed individuals and small business owners, help can be harder to find.

How can your business survive the economic impact of a COVID-19 outbreak — or the social distancing required to prevent one?

Keep Calm & Optimize On.

This is not a time for panic.

I’m seeing some alarming accounts from marketing and SEO friends of clients pulling their contracts and shutting down marketing operations until further notice.

This knee-jerk reaction is setting your business up for a long-term, uphill struggle to recover.

Whether you are a landscaping business, a family-owned restaurant, a small retail shop, or some other privately-owned company, you may experience revenue losses in the coming months. Product or service business, ecommerce or brick-and-mortar, we are all bracing for a hit.

There is a lot of uncertainty around the potential economic impacts of COVID-19, and that is certainly scary.

But what is certain is that we will recover.

“Flattening the curve” works as a method of mitigating the damage of a pandemic by not only reducing the volume of cases and therefore the strain on social systems but also spreading the cases out over time, so they can be handled more effectively.

Organic search is a zero-sum game; your gains or losses are exactly balanced by the gains or losses of others in the SERPs.

We understand paid search and social as a live auction but tend not to think of organic this way.

It is very much a living, breathing, competitive space and if you’re not actively moving ahead, you’re falling behind.

Budgeting for Marketing & SEO During Coronavirus Pandemic

If you’re doing anywhere between $1 and $5 million in sales per year you should be spending 7–8% of gross revenue on advertising and marketing, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration.

I’ve worked with high-growth companies budgeting 10–12%, but for maintenance 7% is a bare minimum.

This means for every $100,000 in gross revenue, you should have at least $7,000 earmarked for advertising and marketing per year.

It is critical that you maintain at least this level of marketing investment throughout the Coronavirus pandemic.

If you cannot afford to grow right now, so be it.

If it makes sense to cut back on some paid advertising for the time being (say, for example, your employees can’t come in to serve customers so there’s no point right now in attracting them to your location), then that’s a logical decision to make.

SEO and inbound marketing are a long game, however.

You’ve invested in building your processes and workflow, ensuring data quality with consistent measurement, building an audience and customer base, and creating quality content that ranks.

What’s more, you can count on the fact that others are going to panic and underestimate the impact of an emotional decision on their 6- to 12-month business horizon.

As their engagement drops, their publishing cadence slows, perhaps their review volume or quality falls off, and they lose traction across channels, you have the opportunity to push ahead and come out on top.

This is the time to stay the course and tackle all of those potentially impactful SEO and marketing tasks you’ve had on your back burner.

Whether you’re working with an agency or handling marketing in-house, these are tasks you can get your team working on while they self-isolate and work remotely.

13 SEO & Marketing Tasks to Do NOW for a Faster Coronavirus Recovery

1. Interview Employees & Customers

Use Zoom or Google Hangouts to host and record video calls.

Interview your employees and customers about their unique experiences with and knowledge of your products, services, and culture.

Use Otter.ai for automated video transcription

In the coming months, these transcripts and videos will be a rich source of insider info for your blog posts, social content, media releases, and more.

2. Do a Mini-Audit of Your Content Assets

A full-blown content audit takes time and expertise, but there is much you can do during this slow period to improve your content performance with a mini-audit.

If you haven’t kept an inventory of your content assets to date, this is a great time to get started.

Create a new Google Sheet or Excel sheet and use one tab for each content type:

· Webpages.

· Emails.

· Blog posts.

· Whitepapers.

· Ebooks.

· Presentations.

· Videos.

· Infographics.

· Articles you’ve published externally.

Etc.

If you get really ambitious, you can track articles others have published about your business, too.

Now evaluate each piece with a critical eye.

· Which high-quality pieces and images can you repurpose for other channels?

· Which pieces got the most social shares? The most backlinks?

· Which ones get the most traffic on-site?

These may all be opportunities for:

· Updating with fresh content.

· Optimizing with new CTAs and keywords.

· Adding internal links to new products/services.

· Repromoting when business picks up again.

3. Plan Webinars

Want to answer frequently asked questions about your approach to small engine repair?

Introduce new team members, products, or features to your customer base?

Inspire seasonal bookings for later this year?

If you’re constantly tied up in the field and now freaking out in an empty office twiddling your thumbs, this is a great time to try out your webinar game.

This is an especially effective marketing tactic in B2B, as 91% of professionals say webinars are their favorite content format for learning.

4. Clean up Your Administrative Messes

“Here are some of the things I’m planning to do:

· Administrative work: clean up files, delete things I don’t need anymore, close open contracts that shouldn’t be open.

· Website: write some posts I’ve been meaning to get to that have evergreen advice, and do a long overdue SEO clean up.

· Webinars and Podcasts: research some that I can pitch to and work on some pitches and ideas for the future.

· Books: read that stack of marketing books I haven’t gotten to!” — Jenny Halasz

5. Take Aim at Different Types of SERPS

If you’re like a lot of small business owners, you haven’t had time to even think about getting any more sophisticated than having a presence in search and maybe trying to balance your organic and PPC efforts for good coverage.

Now that you may have a bit of time and space to dig deeper, you can plot your domination of position zero, video carousels, paragraph snippets, and more.

6. Get Recording Videos

Videos are great SEO fodder on their own, they can help you:

· Target long-tail keywords.

· Trigger featured snippets.

· Appear in relevant YouTube searches.

But they can also be the basis for all types of other content, too.

As mentioned above, Otter.ai is a low-cost way to transcribe video with AI (and if you have employees in need of at-home work, you can get them to watch the video and clean up the transcripts, as the tech isn’t perfect).

Embed the video in a blog post and include the transcript.

Take screenshots and use them as images in social.

Take 5–10 quotes from the video transcript and use them alongside images on Instagram in the coming months.

Reuse those quotes in media releases and upcoming blog posts.

7. Work on Your Online Reviews Strategy

The web is littered with online reviews companies haven’t answered.

You don’t have to go back to the dawn of Yelp time and answer each one, but this is a good time to make sure your more recent reviews have a thoughtful response.

Create a reviews policy and, if you have a good candidate, train an employee now to manage your online reviews going forward.

Write some template responses and go over your brand messaging with them.

Coach them on responding to negative reviews and escalating legit customer service issues to the right person.

Give them the tools they need to monitor reviews and get alerts.

Show them what you expect as far as measuring the value of reviews and monthly reporting.

8. Get Behind Digital in a Big Way

“Get your storefront online so that people can shift from personal shopping to parcel delivery. Get better at video. Loom just halved their rates. I got a 1-year Pro plan today for $48USD/year. It’s a massive tool for sharing information with clients and contacts. Evangelize telecommuting. Share the word about remote tools like Skype, Zoom, Google Docs, etc.” — Shawn DeWolfe

9. Update Your Google My Business Profile for Local Customers

Are you operating on special hours?

Taking special care to avoid the spread of COVID-19?

Google wants local businesses to use the tools available within the GMB dashboard to let customers know what’s changed.

Update your hours and business description, share Google Posts with updates and offers, and make sure your contact information is correct in case people are trying to reach you.

10. Show Your Website Some Love

“Fix your site. You know it’s not perfect, spend some time practicing what you preach and make your site the lead magnet it needs to be!” — Grant Simmons

11. Sniff out Unnatural Links

In her recent column, Anna Crowe shared a couple of pretty compelling stories about the importance of seeking and destroying unnatural backlinks.

In one case, a site had received a manual Google penalty but achieved a top 3 positioning within weeks of removing a disavow file and removing over 1,900 unnatural links.

In another, a site lost 82% of its traffic after building thousands of unnatural links.

There are a lot of different ways unnatural links can happen, and they’re not all intentional.

An unscrupulous SEO here, a shady competitor there and suddenly you can’t figure out why your SEO efforts aren’t paying off.

In How to Find Unnatural Links to Your Site & What to Do About Them, Crowe explains 11 types of unnatural links to watch out for and lays out a step-by-step process for sussing them out.

12. Consider an Outreach Strategy

Whether or not reaching out to your customers during a pandemic is appropriate depends entirely on your type of business, your existing relationship with customers, and the purpose of the communication.

Are customers used to hearing from you regularly by email, SMS messaging or social media?

Don’t let that relationship drop off.

Stay away from tacky disaster-related promotions (looking at you, American Apparel with your Hurricane Sandy Sale).

What you can do is get creative and think of how you can offer reassurance, social connection, or tangible assistance during COVID-19.

“Making the decision to cut your budget at this time is reactionary rather than strategic. SEO and online marketing are avenues to build connection and trust with people and how you do that during challenging times matters just as much as when you’re ready to serve or sell them directly.” — Marketing and SEO strategist Monisha Bajaj

“Making the decision to cut your budget at this time is reactionary rather than strategic,” explains marketing and SEO strategist Monisha Bajaj.

“SEO and online marketing are avenues to build connection and trust with people and how you do that during challenging times matters just as much as when you’re ready to serve or sell them directly.”

· Could you host an online video space once a week for people to check-in, have a light discussion on trends in your industry, and maybe trade tricks or tips relevant to your product or service?

· Can you be a local leader in distributing reputable information to your community about COVID-19 supports? Remember that a lot of places no longer have a local newspaper or radio station. If you have the time to gather information from local government and health agencies and make sure people know where they can get tested for Coronavirus, what steps they should take to report symptoms, etc., why not publish it in a blog or your email newsletter? Include a disclaimer that you are not giving medical advice, and always link back to the original source of the information so people can verify it for themselves.

· Let customers know how your business is changing or adapting to protect them and your employees. Encourage conversation and be forthcoming in answering questions or concerns they may have.

13. Get to Know Customers Better With a Deep Dive Into Your First-Party Data

“Go through your analytics and sales/lead data. What do you know about your customers? What do you know about prospects that didn’t pick you (or about people near your business that don’t shop with you)? What is in the analytics data that you have missed in the past — are they on iPhones, all visit from city X? Compare offline and online trends and determine what could you fix today that you have never had time to do.” — Dave Rohrer

And Remember, Put On Your Own Oxygen Mask First…

Supply chain interruptions, the need for social distancing, and impending economic uncertainty are all serious stressors for business owners.

You have responsibilities to employees, customers, and other stakeholders — but you need to take care of yourself so you’re in shape to take care of those others, first.

The WHO has released a document entitled Mental Health Considerations During COVID-19 Outbreak that I recommend as a resource for all of us struggling to come to terms with this fast-evolving threat.

Words matter. Perspective matters.

Focusing on the future and what we can do to prepare for recovery matters.

Do you have plans to tackle certain aspects of your business if you experience a slow-down? Share your tips for others in the comments.

SOURCE: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-marketing-combat-coronavirus-impact/354780/

Marketing in Times of Uncertainty - Whiteboard Friday

Our work as marketers has transformed drastically in the space of a month. Everyone’s looking for an answer on how to do our jobs empathetically and effectively through one of the most difficult trials in modern memory.

We hope you’ve got a cozy seat in your home office, a hot mug of coffee from your own kitchen Keurig, and your cat in your lap as you join us for today.

Video Transcription

I think that now is the right time to talk about marketing in uncertain epochs like the one we’re living through. We obviously have a global crisis. It’s very serious. But most of you watch Whiteboard Friday. They want to help people through this crisis. And that means doing marketing. And I don’t think that now is the right time for us to stop our marketing activities. In fact, I think it’s time to probably crunch down and do some hard work.

So let’s talk about what’s going on. And then I’ll give some tactics that I hope will be helpful to you and your teams, your clients, your bosses, everyone at your organizations as we’re going through this together.

The Business World Is Experiencing Widespread Repercussions

First off, we are in this cycle of trying to prevent massive amounts of death, which is absolutely the right thing to do. But because of that, I think a lot of us in the business world, in the marketing world, are experiencing pain, particularly in certain industries. In some industries obviously demand is spiking, it’s skyrocketing for, you know, coronavirus-related reasons. And in other cases, demand is down. That’s because we sort of have this inability to go out.

We can’t go to bars and restaurants and movies and bowling alleys and go do all the things we would normally do. So, we don’t need fancy clothes to go do it and we don’t need haircuts — this is probably the last Whiteboard Friday I would want to record before needing a cut. And all of that spending, right, that consumer spending affects business-to-business spending as well.

Lower spending → cost-cutting → lower investment/layoffs → environment of fear…

It leads to cost cutting by businesses because they know there’s not as much demand. It leads to lower investment and oftentimes layoffs as we saw in the United States, where nearly 10 million workers are are out of work, according to the latest stats from the federal government. And that builds this environment of fear, right. None of us have faced anything like this. This is much bigger and worse, at least this spike of it is, than the Great Recession of 2008. And, of course, all of these things contribute to lower spending across the board.

However, what’s interesting about this moment in time is that it is a compressed moment. Right. It’s not a long-term fear of of what will happen. I think there’s fears about whether the recession will take a long time to recover from. But we know that eventually, sometime between 3 and 18 months from now, spending will resume and there will be this new normal. I think of now as a time when marketing needs to change its tone and attitude.

Businesses need to change their tone and attitude and in three ways. And that’s what I want to talk through.

Three Crucial Points

1. Cut with a scalpel, not with a chainsaw

First off, as you are looking to save money and if you’re an agency, if you’re a consultant, your clients are almost certainly saying, “Hey, where can we pull back and still get returns on investment?” And I think one of the important points is not to cut with a chainsaw. Right. Not to take a big whack to, “Oh, let’s just look at all of our Google and Facebook ad spending and cut it out entirely.” Or “Let’s look at all of our content marketing investments and drop them completely.” That’s not probably not the right way to go.

Instead, we should be looking to cut with a scalpel, and that means examining each channel and the individual contributors inside channels as individuals and looking at whether they are ROI-positive. I would urge against looking at a say, one-week, two-week, three-week trend. The last three weeks spending is very frozen and I believe that it will open up more again. I think most economists agree. You can see that’s why the the public stock markets have not crashed nearly as hard. We’ve had some bouncing around.

And I think that’s because people know that we will get to this point where people are ordering online. They are using businesses online. They are getting deliveries. They are doing activities through the Internet over the course of however long we’re quarantined or there is fear about going out and then it will return to a new normal.

And so because of that, you should probably be looking something like six to twelve weeks in the past and trying to sort out, OK, where are the trends, where are their lifelines and opportunities and points of light? And let’s look at those ROI-positive channels and not cut them too soon.

Likewise, you can look inside a channel. If you haven’t seen it already, I highly recommend Seer Interactive’s guide to cutting with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer, and they look at how you can analyze your Google Ads accounts to find keywords that are probably still sending you valuable traffic that you should not pull back on. I would also caution — I’ve talked to a bunch of folks recently who’s seen Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and YouTube and Google ad inventory at historically low prices. So if you have ROI-positive channels right now or your clients do, now is an awesome time to be to potentially be putting some dollars into that.

2. Invest now for the second & third waves in the future

Second thing, I would invest now for the second and third waves. I think that’s a really smart way to go. You can look at Harvard Business Review and Bloomberg and a bunch of folks have written about investing during times of recession, times of fear, and seeing how. Basically when we when we go through wave one, which I think will be still another two to six weeks, of sort of nothing but virus-related news, nothing but COVID-19, and get to a point where we’re transitioning to this life online. It’s becoming our new every day. And then getting to a post-crisis new normal, you know, after we have robust testing and quarantining has hopefully worked out well. The hospital systems aren’t overwhelmed and maybe a vaccine as is near development or done.

When those things start to come, we will want to have now messaging and content and keyword demands serving. Right. And ads and webinars. Anything that is in our marketing inventory that can be helpful to people, not just during this time, but over the course of these, because if we make these investments now, we will be better set up than our competitors who are pulling back to execute on this. And that is what that research shows, right, that essentially folks who invest in marketing, in sales during a recession tend to outperform and more quickly outperform their competition as markets resume. You don’t even have to wait for them to get good — just as they start to pick up.

3. Read the room

The third and possibly most important thing right now is, I think, to read the room. People are paying attention online like never before. And if you’re doing web marketing, they’re paying attention to your work. To our work. That means we need to be more empathetic than we have been historically, right? They are. Our audiences are not thinking about the same things they were weeks ago. They’re in a very new mindset. It doesn’t matter if they’re business-to-business or business-to-consumer. You are dealing with everyone on the planet basically obsessed with the conditions that we’re all in right now. That means assuming that everyone is thinking about this.

I really think the best type of content you create, the best type of marketing you can create right now across any channel, any platform is stuff that helps first. Helps other people. It could be in big ways. It could be in small ways.

The Getty Museum, I don’t know if you saw Avinash Kaushik’s great post about the Getty Museum. They did this fun thing where they took pictures from their museum, famous paintings and they put them online and said, “Hey, go around your home and try and recreate these and we’ll post them.” Is it helping health care workers get masks? No. But is it helping people at home with their kids, with their families, with their loved ones have a little fun, take their mind off the crisis, engage with art in a way that maybe they can’t because they can’t go to museums right now? Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s fine. It’s okay to help in little ways, too, but help first.

I also think it’s okay to talk about content or subjects that are not necessarily related to the virus. Look, web marketing right now is not directly related to the coronavirus. It’s not even directly related to some of the follow-on effects of that. But I’m hoping that it’s helpful. And I’m hoping that we can talk about it in empathetic and thoughtful ways. We’d just have to have to read the room.

It is okay to recognize that this crisis is affecting your customers and to talk about things that aren’t directly related but are still useful to them.

And if you can, I would try not to ignore this, right? Not to create things that are completely unrelated, that feel like, “Gosh, this could have been launched at any time in the last six months, sort of feels tone deaf.” I think everything that we do is viewed through the lens of what’s happening right now. And certainly I have that experience as I go through online content.

Do not dismiss the scenario. I think that that history will reflect very poorly. History is moving so fast right now that it is already reflecting poorly on people who are doing this.

Don’t exploit the crisis in a shameless way. I’ve seen a few marketing companies and agencies. I won’t point them out because I don’t think shaming is the right thing to do right now, but show how you’re helping. Don’t exploit by saying “It’s coronavirus times. We have a sale.” All right? Say, “Oh, we are offering a discount on our products because we know that money is tight right now and we are helping this crisis by donating 10 percent of whatever.” Or, “We are helping by offering you something that you can do at home with your family or something that will help you with remote work or something that will help you through whatever you’re going through,” whatever your customers are going through.

Don’t keep your tone and tactics the same right now. Oh, yes, I think that’s kind of madness as well. I would urge you, as you’re creating all this potentially good stuff, new stuff, stuff that plans for the future and that speaks to right now, go ahead and audit your marketing. Look at the e-mail newsletters you’re sending out. Look at the sequential emails that are in your site onboarding cycles. Look at the overlay messaging, look at your home page, look at your About page.

Make sure that you’re either not ignoring the crisis or speaking effectively to it. Right. I don’t think every page on a website needs to change right now. I don’t think every marketing message has to change. But I think that in many cases it’s the right thing to do to conduct an audit and to make sure that you are not being insensitive or perceived as insincere.

All right, everyone, I hope that you are staying safe, that you’re staying at home, that you’re washing your hands. And I promise you, together, we’re going to get through this.

SOURCE: https://moz.com/blog/marketing-in-times-of-uncertainty