How to Embrace eCommerce Change Post COVID-19 with SEO

"When the going gets tough, the tough get going" is a clichéd phrase but it applies aptly to the current Covid-19 situation. There is no end in sight and businesses face a severe crunch, especially eCommerce. Do you simply down shutters or gird up your loins and get down to taking on the challenge? The latter is preferable and for this, SEO is the best tool to help you adapt to changing market scenarios.

The changed situation changed the mindset

Covid-19 put the brakes on the rampaging growth of the eCommerce segment. It may be temporary but until it regains the Statista forecasted growth rate of 22% in 2023 there is a gap. This time gap can be a deal-breaker for eCommerce operators. If you do not flourish you simply go down. Statistics such as predictions that the e-commerce segment will exceed $ 14 trillion are meaningless unless your operations are healthy and in the black.

The pandemic induced lockdown and the economic downturn has made people care about discretionary spending. Conventional digital promotions may simply not work because people's mindset has changed and they are searching online with an entirely different set of keywords. This means your SEO strategy needs realignment.

An exercise in utility

You must have invested quite a bit of time and effort to shortlist keywords that you use in promotional content and on your website. Unfortunately, these are not the hottest ones. Customers now use different sets of keywords and search for different products as well. What this means is that you will have to redo your exercise of keyword selection using Google Trends and Google Search Console to find out the rankings of keywords and realign content as well as the website.

Fast update and remodeling of your eCommerce site

The smart thing to do is to simply remodel and redesign your eCommerce site to align with changed customer behaviors and expectations. Quite a few sites, as you will find, have added fresh contents and pages referencing Covid-19. Some have gone further to introduce products relevant to current times like gloves, masks, and sanitizers, experiencing more traffic in the process. Take a leaf out of their book, redo your eCommerce site with the help of expert eCommerce website developers and then double down on SEO by creating more Covid-19 referenced content using newly researched keywords.

Time to go all out

Economic downturn naturally leads to tightening controls over spending and SEO gets the ax. Do not do this. Instead, engage SEO professionals who know what it takes to succeed in Covid-19 times to get you more visibility and more traffic. Get your team to implement PPC, paid social promotions, and content marketing.

Visibility is important for you to be found and for your eCommerce site to get traffic. It also sends across a message: you are thriving and can be trusted to deliver products they order, without delay. People are at home and those who are not working from home spend more time surfing the net. You are not limited to just text content; video can be your greatest ally since more people prefer to watch videos. Create videos relevant to their interest and ones that push your message across.

Attitudinal change

While the present pandemic is a great opportunity for profit, it does not mean you do so by exploiting people's apprehensions or urgent requirements. Instead, it pays to humanize your e-commerce operations, showing an understanding of people's situations and appreciation for their needs.

Words are good but doing something concrete such as bundling offers to reduce cost incidence is a great way to show concern and this can be highlighted in your SEO campaigns, especially those on social media. People appreciate and remember. Then again, you do not have to sell; you can give away freebies to show you are helpful.

That earns brownie points. Do this on social media and you are likely to see a leap in numbers. For stuff you must charge for, you can always tie up with services that offer EMIs. Say, for instance, you launch a PPC campaign and give prominence to these aspects. You should see a surge in traffic.

Manufacturing relevance

Dire times need dire remedies. In the usual course of SEO, the thing to do to promote a product like machinery or equipment would be to write on related fields, use relevant keywords, and target prospective buyers. Go off at a tangent with your SEO. The current trending topics are education, health, and fitness, grocery, services, cooking, and even work from home opportunities. Take these threads and weave them into the fabric of your SEO. IT is important to be found and to come across as someone in one field showing concern in an utterly different field just so for the sake of helping out.

For instance, an equipment manufacturer may launch SEO with keywords in any of the above-mentioned segments and link health and fitness courses with their equipment.

SEO can show unexpected business opportunities

There is more to search engine keyword analysis than meets the eye. For instance, the in-depth analysis could show an unusually high frequency for a particular set of keywords about some product or service which is in short supply. Manufacturers or suppliers may have disappeared off the map and this is the right time to step in.

Which items to choose is what SEO finds out for you. If your native product sales are sluggish it is time to roll up your sleeves and use your capacity to launch products for which there is a demand. Engaging with SEOs will help you to find out exactly which items to choose.

SEO services for Ecommerce gives knowledge and does things to keep you visible in the dark COVID clouded skies. Visibility matters. You get people flocking to your digital doors. The pandemic can work its rampage but with the right SEO techniques, possibly with the help of an SEO expert, you could be blazing your own trail.

This guest post was written by Rakshit, acontent marketer at PeddleWeb, an internet advertising company in India. He holds spectacular skills in digital marketing, branding, lead generation, customer retention and a few more. People can follow him on Twitter and connect on LinkedIn.