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7 Ways Your SEO Metric and Search Traffic is Affected by COVID-19 & How to Overcome
Novel Coronavirus is spread all over the world like a forest fire, and the sad reality is it will continue to spread to for a while. Over a thousand new cases are reporting day by day. As of today, no one knows how it is spreading, and it literally caused a huge impact on the downfall of the global stock market, which means the many businesses are hugely affected.
So one the major question which rises in the all the online marketers is, “Does it really affect the SEO metric and traffic of the website?”
The answer is “it depends” on the business. We know the search results are completely based on human behavior. Due to the recent outbreak of COVID-19 has affected the various industries in different ways.
For instance, E-commerce industries are gaining a huge amount of traffic due to things like social distancing, and lockdown made people shop things online. As your business involves in online marketing, it is essential to know how to respond to this situation. Here I have listed down the data of various industries which are affected by search traffic and how to overcome the situation.
Let’s begin
1. E-commerce is surging up
As I mentioned earlier, there is no denying fact E-commerce are gaining more traffic and impression (especially website that is selling essential).
Most of the traffic is generated from people search for a face mask, sanitizer, disinfectant wipes, thermometer, and other products related to pandemic.
Due to the huge demand in such products created with new search queries like “hand sanitizer near me” and “disinfectant wipes near me.”
On the downside, people are less interested in buying travel products, beauty products. However, the people’s interest might change one essential today might not be essential tomorrow.
#Solution
As the demand for the product such as prevention of COVID-19 is more of the surge today. Ecommerce SEOs might consider creating, on your basis of impressions/course data, a high demand segment of product pages for close monitoring.
Crawl these error pages several times. Monitor log files to ensure that search engine bots errors are not being served. Allow your website navigation quick to find.
To ensure the content represents the most recent search attempts, look at the query data on these pages.
2. A sudden surge of traffic in Health and wellness sites traffic
Yes, as the pandemic raises, the health and wellness website is attracting huge traffic and an increase in SEO metrics.
Recently we can see the hype in the content like “Symptoms, advice, and prevention measure the COVID-19” “Immunity booster foods to prevent COVID-19 and other medical issues. On the downside, people are very less likely to care about “Diet plans and fasting.”
#Solution
It is now more important than ever to strive for expertise, authority, and trust in this type of content. People turn to search engines, a responsibility which cannot be taken lightly, to respond to their medical issues.
3. The uprise of traffic in Recipe Website
The rise of the traffic is not so high when compared to other eCommerce or health care website. However, due to more people are working at home, the queries like How to make pancake easily, How to make a good cup of coffee, such type of keywords are gaining traffic. It might tend to increase as long as the restaurants are closed.
#Solution
Leverage, some of the increased recipes, demand by using structured data on recipes to boost the search results for your recipes, to Try publishing or supporting recopies that use less more readily available ingredients and ingredients right now.
4. A travel website is also in a slight uptick
One might disagree travel websites are not getting traffic as the travel bans should have reduced the sales. But to the surprise, I have seen impressions and surge up on the website due to the fact people are looking to cancel their tickets or rescheduling or refund for the booking.
And also I have seen uplift queries like “Cheap омг омг flight” due to the cancellation of flight and travel.
#Solution
Travel companies are likely to shift towards customer service and reputation management rather than procurement.
Travel SEOs will assist with the initiative by tracking their question data closely and thereby educating their audience about where their demand changes.
5. Publisher Website is in high demand
It comes with no surprise publisher websites are experiencing a huge surge in traffic. There are many people searching for information, from the coronavirus charts to the impact on the stock market of coronavirus. Of course, one thing was that we were all glued late (for better or worse) to the television.
#Solution
As the news and update of the coronavirus are reporting by the journalist. Publishers can help them in many ways like
• Monitoring log file to ensure AMP pages are doing well
• To ensure that new pages are crawling by search engine bots as early as possible, track pages by publication date.
• Coordinate constant green material to make up for uncertainty in terms of season and news.
6. The restaurant is in oscillation
While I haven’t been able to look at any data from restaurant sites directly, the effects are apparent. In many locations, restaurants are operating at limited capacity.
In many others (including my home county of Los Angeles), restaurants and bars are closed completely.
That means queries local restaurants may have relied on pre-COVID are trending down. Third-party delivery services like UberEats, Swiggy, Zomato, and Foodpanda are also trending up.
Thankfully, those companies are temporarily waiving fees they charge some restaurants in order to help them stay afloat during this time.
7. Volatility Is Present in Websites across the Board
Times are unpredictable, but one thing is sure, the uncertainty currently affects almost all of my websites. Empathy and data from your own website is a King in these times of volatility.
But make sure that you look at your own query data. Benchmarks can be helpful. It gives you an insight into the desires of your audience. Are you or are you not comfortable with these needs?
There’s one acquisition channel that doesn’t disable during budget cuts at a time when brands have to cut back their campaign costs. While the current situation is big, SEO is now more important than ever.
