HOW SEO HAS HELPED BUSINESSES SURVIVE THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC

The coronavirus pandemic hit businesses hard, with many forced to rethink how they did things. Due to a decrease in physical visits and cashflow, most businesses reduced their marketing budgets and instead turned to online platforms to see if they could make some money while keeping costs low. A major component of these businesses going online was ensuring they could leverage SEO to reach people they previously could using traditional marketing. SEO became one of the most important marketing strategies for the businesses that went online, and for good reason.

SEO Has Helped Capture New Customers

Many people are spending more time online than they did before the pandemic hit. It is also true that more people are shopping online. Companies that have good SEO have seen their customer numbers rise or stay relatively the same. This is because SEO has made it easier for people to find them online. Businesses that could be found this way have also seen increased sales due to the increase in the number of customers visiting their online shops and with a sizable amount of these people purchasing online.

SEO Helped Businesses Establish a Local Presence

Although every business wants to go global, there is a lot of value in having a strong local presence. Local online searches for goods and services surged during the pandemic. Businesses that had done their SEO targeting their immediate locality were able to capture more customers from their areas, thereby helping them establish a local presence.

In addition, people are much more likely to shop at a local store than a regional one because of the shipping times. This afforded businesses that focused on their localities a massive advantage that might just have saved them.

SEO Helped Cut Costs

The one thing businesses that want to survive the pandemic understood from the very beginning is that they had to cut costs. The money saved could be used to maintain some form of business presence even if the business was not expanding. SEO helped these businesses do this by eliminating their advertising budgets.

Search engine algorithms show pages on search results based on several SEO criteria. Focusing on these things ensures your website sits at the top of search engine results, meaning people can find you without you having to pay for PPC or other types of ads.

Another advantage of using SEO is that a lot of people trust organic search than they do ads. So, even if businesses spent money on ads during the pandemic, they would not have realised the ROI they were looking for.

SEO Helped Businesses Stay Ahead of the Competition

Every business that has an online presence is always working to get ranked higher on search result pages. Businesses that focused on their SEO before the pandemic and remained at the top of search engine result pages were able to stay ahead of their competition by having more people clicking on their link and visiting their website. By doing this, they were able to make more sales and even establish some form of brand permanence in their visitors’ minds, which will help them stay ahead in the future.

Although it did look like the coronavirus pandemic would decimate most businesses, businesses that were ready and those that adapted were able to come out of this pandemic stronger. SEO was a very potent tool for finding new customers, increasing sales, keeping up with competition and growing a local brand.