Post-Pandemic SEO Plan

Today, every business may get either direct or indirect impact from the COVID-19 disease for sure. However, you may also be aware that some businesses in the same business sector may get high impact. In contrast, other companies in the same industry may get less impact than others. At this point, you may start asking lots of questions, and one of the questions would be, why are they so lucky? As one of the best digital marketing agencies in Thailand, we have found that it has nothing to do with luck, but it requires preparation and a perfect plan to stay ahead of the competition.

However, today we are not going to talk about the pre-pandemic marketing plan as it has already passed. We cannot do anything about it (unless you have a time machine). Today, I would like to suggest how to identify potential problems in your SEO Marketing Plan, from tiny problems to critical issues. I will also go through how to handle those issues properly with effective SEO strategy, from boosting organic traffic via blog posts, optimize keywords on seed keywords to long-tail keywords by analyzing search intent and search volume, improve user experience by using anchor text to create internal links, technical SEO audit to improve website performance and exposure on any search engines, as well as link building that can give you a big boost to your ranking. And lastly, demonstrate how to create an SEO strategy to match up with your needs.

Identify the current and potential problems on your SEO Strategy Marketing Plan

To ensure the business operation during Covid or any pandemic, you should have an SEO Marketing Plan to protect the interest of your business. Covid is known as a global pandemic that can occur at any time. Still, it would be best if you had some prevention and control plans in case Covid hits your industry. If Covid happens, SEO Marketing Plan could help control the loss during Covid or pandemic. To identifying the potential problem in your SEO Strategy Marketing Plan, you should identify the common mistake that website owners may not realize during or after the Covid pandemic. Some of these are:

1. Losing Organic Traffic 2. Ranking Positions are lower than competitors 3. Unsatisfied analytics metrics 4. Unpleasant User Experience 5. Difficulty in competing with client

Losing Organic Traffic

Since the pandemic is affecting many businesses by temporarily closing down their physical shop, customers tend to find more information online since it is one of the easiest ways to get updated information. This is how SEO can greatly improve your marketing campaign. We are in the world of information and obtaining information is just a fingertip away. Lots of website owner tends to update their information on social media such as Facebook or Instagram but they do not realize that the actual website ranks on a keyword, not a social media page. When a pandemic outbreak happens, such as COVID-19, customers tend to find information or articles to give some guidance or advice that can benefit users or readers. Blog posts like these tend to bring traffic to your website from an organic search or, commonly, Google's search!

Best Practices for this scenario are to have a perfect content strategy, or some would call content marketing by either optimize your site existing content or create new content to follow a current trend. The next Content SEO Strategy plan would be a blog post on your website. As your current landing page may not make sense to add trendy content or time content (2020 Best Practice for SEO) as it tends to be outdated in the future. Therefore, we may need to create an SEO content article for multiple blog posts. Nowadays, search engine such as Google tends to give more value to an updated or trend info. If your site contains lots of blog posts, it should be a good traffic driving into your website. People on the internet tend to search for something short and easy. For example "Covid Business Plan", "Covid SEO Plan", or "Covid Marketing Strategy". With this content, search engines such as Google will treat it as high-quality content and relevant content to the user's search intent.

Ranking Positions are lower than competitors

Many website owners or business owners may not realize that they should optimize their website for SEO search or, in particular, Google Search. You may not realize this until you are doing a proper competitor analysis or market research on your business position. Ranking performance can be one of the SEO or digital marketing KPIs to check how successful you are. You may find out that when you search some targeted keywords, no matter seed keywords or long-tail keywords, your business pages may not show on the search engines' first page. Suppose you are getting your website ranking in a low position or not on the first page, there are lots of consequences that can happen like losing traffic to losing a business opportunity. This is how search engine optimization takes a lead role here.

Keyword Research should be one of your strategies, as this can create a focus or concentrate on a certain area, thinking of search queries as a targeted keyword would be one of the best ways to get a nice targeted keyword as well. Other SEO strategies that will directly impact ranking positions are page optimization for a mobile device, web pages with relevant content, logical site architecture, and meta tags optimization on your site (Page Title, H1s and Meta Description). Targeted Keywords visibilities will increase a great chance of getting a click and exposure on Google and getting more potential business for sure, even though we are in a pandemic situation, but there is always demand out there in the market.

Unsatisfied Analytics Metrics

I have to admit, there are so many metrics out there in the world of SEO, starting from Domain authority or how your website is rankable from the tools' perspective. Also, there are lots of metrics from Google Analytics and Google Search Console such as Clicks, Impressions, Sessions and more. When your site has most of the metrics low, not just from a search engine perspective, human users may tend to distrust the website and prefer other websites that have high metrics or even higher ranking positions. Up to this point, you may start freaking out how to improve all the possible available metrics to be in an optimal range. My short answer is, just keep optimizing your website, make sure that you create a website for human users not just for robots. You can manipulate some of the metrics to get your site more attractive to search engines, but eventually, a number of clicks may get a huge drop, as it provides no benefit or value to the actual user. Making your website natural with content and balance all the site's components should be the best answer.

Unpleasant User Experience

Your site may appear on search results on multiple search engines. However, you may end up getting a high bounce rate and exit rate to your website. In general, if you find some books or even a manual that is too complicated, you may stop reading them - this rule also applies on the site as well. Suppose your website has a messy site structure with no internal linking to any other important pages, you may lose some users along the way. Users may start to think "Why do I have to spend so much time on this website when it has provided me with no benefit or any information that I expected?" From the data that we gather in our agency, we have found that the more pleasant experience that we can provide, the better the website can perform on both performance and generating revenue.

I mentioned internal linking earlier because it is considered to be one of the ranking factors that directly impact the ranking performance. Both search engines and users are using these to understand and make sense of the content or landing pages we have put on the site. Also, if possible, try to consider the Local SEO concept on your site or blog content, as this can directly respond to local demands the most.

Difficulty in competing with competitors

Even though you have optimized your website well and added lots of relevant content and blog to your website, why is it still not on edge of the competition? Link Building is a secret here in the world of SEO. Links or backlinks can be a link juice to your site and increase your website authority as well as the boost of confidence to search engines such as Google to see how important this site is. Building links is very important to get your website a better position in the competition with others.

This can happen to lots of website owners as before Covid or pandemic situation, their website is doing fine. However, once the pandemic or outbreaking phase has passed, your competitors tend to get a position higher than you. This is quite normal to Google's perspective as the ranking movement should be dynamically fluctuating over time depending on the popularity and the quality of the sites at that particular time. Also, suppose your sites are having high-value information and get word-of-mouth, or in the SEO world, your site will be more attractive since Google believe that this site should have the most value on the particular keyword. It is considered to be a smart approach if we are constantly building links towards your site, to increase a link value and eventually your position on the search results.

Perfect SEO Plan for Covid-19

This is the million-dollar question to us all on improving or optimizing the site to be the best and get the most of it from Google. However, in terms of optimizing for SEO can be subjective in many aspects. It requires a lot of experience and experts in some marketing plans to stay ahead of the competition. The strategy of your SEO plan can be various, depends on the nature of your business, but if you ask me where should you focus on your SEO plan, I would highly recommend content. As content marketing is taking a bigger role than ever, as users tend to find more information online and if we have sufficient content or information for internet users to absorb, then it is possible that your website will be more recognized than others.

However, it doesn't mean that a content marketing strategy will be a ticket to your success in any business. It requires you to put a lot of effort into observation and critical thinking skills as well. One concept that I would like you to consider is a competitive advantage. According to Investopedia, no one in this world should maximize their time and effort on everything, they should focus on what they are doing best like how to get new business and leads during Covid, while marketing plans such as SEO should be passed on an SEO expert such as Move Ahead Media. Contact us now for a free SEO website Audit.

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