The staggering impact of COVID-19 on businesses, which is already at this point in time undeniable, merits proactive - if not drastic - measures. It is a crisis that forces everyone’s hand, and much like any dire situation that does this, we should be as unrelenting when responding in kind. More importantly, recovery and even continuous development should be prioritized by enterprises that have the means and opportunities to ensure these.
What’s good is that there’s no shortage of ways to achieve this via SEO alone. Boosting online presence is pretty much a necessity now with this new norm, after all, with social distancing and quarantine being strictly implemented and regulated worldwide. Efficient utilization of schema, FAQs, AMP, and voice search are some of the powerful tools at your disposal you can use to steer your business towards the road of recovery and subsequent growth.
Of course, this takes knowing the key issues that your business has as a result of the spread of the coronavirus. We assume that you have already identified them and have come up with alternative offers that are more attuned to your audience’s needs during this time. This takes researching numerous platforms like forums, social media, website searches, and Google Trends.
Afterward, it’s important to establish your goals, particularly your SEO objectives. It goes without saying that raising your SERP rankings and increasing traffic is but some of them. You can start by knowing how to use the four platforms we mentioned above to achieve them and, in turn, mitigate and overcome the impact of COVID-19 on your business.
Making sure the information you relay through answers in your FAQs section is verified and true is of prime importance when faced with this disaster. Your clients need to know the current status of your business and where you plan to take it from there. It’s pretty much a given that you will be introducing a lot of changes, and what could be better than sharing these changes and making them known to your clients through FAQs?
This entails answering questions that are both evergreen and transient in nature. With regards to the latter, since the COVID-19 crisis is continuously ongoing and developing happening, making sure that your FAQs are regularly updated will prove to be beneficial to your customers and your SEO efforts in the long run. The former, on the other hand, is still crucial because these are the key concerns your clients would have regarding the products and services you can still offer during and after this crisis.
One proactive way you can use FAQs to improve your search rankings is to research the most common questions that people are asking at present, meaning the popular queries in your industry and niche that are prevalent in the midst of this pandemic. This is very effective because it is one good way of showing your clients that you are addressing their present problems in this crisis. Not only will these FAQs feature more prominently in search but doing this will undoubtedly boost your website’s CTR as well.
Using schemas has long been touted as one of the best ways to help Google understand any website's content better. It allows you to point Google in the right direction, which in a way, can be considered no less than direct SEO. You are serving content to the crawlers rather than users, after all; content that the former can use to enhance their knowledge of your site.
The logic behind this is that sites that the crawlers deeply understand will inevitably begin ranking for their target keywords. Crawlers are essential aspects of any search engine, not least of which is Google with its clear endorsement of structured data markup to webmasters. And the fact that types of schemas are still constantly increasing only asserts their importance in SEO. As of this writing, more than 800 types already exist.
That said, there's no better time than now to make the most of the perks that schemas impart to your business. Many experienced SEO experts can attest to the efficacy of deploying schemas to increase traffic and ranking.
Admittedly, schema can be hard to deploy due to its complex code and architecture and the usually immense IT code needed. To get the most benefit out of it requires a solid strategy. Nesting schemas is one such strategy and usually involves establishing the relationship between objects in your blog. This often requires identifying which fields to nest. In the end, it is done to mark up every product you offer and relate it to your company.
Mobile users now form the majority of the traffic bulk in plenty of niches and industries doing business online. Accelerated mobile pages are ideal for boosting loading times, which only leads to better SERP visibility, user engagement, and even conversion. Also, it’s a Google creation and has always been promoted by the search engine giant for years now.
Almost all sites that have used AMP can report a tenfold increase in their speed. Statistics also show that sites that use AMP tend to enjoy significantly higher rankings on the SERPs and better CTRs. This only confirms the role that the site’s speed plays in not only boosting rankings but improving overall user experience as well.
Nonetheless, it’s not without its hurdles. One common issue AMP sites have is that their desktop versions tend to take a hit (i.e. get desynchronized from the mobile version), emphasizing the need for proper implementation.
The rise of voice search has been one of the notable trends that had been predicted to gain further traction in 2020. It also offers a different way for websites to acquire traffic from. And with the utter convenience that it brings to the table for searchers, it’s only bound to become more significant in SEO in a COVID-19 world and beyond.
With this considered, it’s high time to start looking at how Alexa and Google Assistant, the premiere digital assistants in voice search, can boost your SEO campaigns.
The road to recovery from COVID-19, thankfully, is filled with alternative pathways you can take leading to better, even greener fields for your business. You just have to take the time and effort to learn about them and know how to properly traverse them. These facts also demonstrate that the coronavirus pandemic is having a hard time infecting the world of SEO.
