With so many rapid changes taking place during the current COVID-19 crisis, businesses need to adapt just as quickly. There is a great opportunity to use this time to transform your marketing strategy and update your website with fresh content that will help your brand to grow organically.

People are searching online more than ever and a smart way to ensure that your brand is at the forefront of their minds is to ramp up your SEO. SEO is the most cost-effective way of generating traffic and maintaining your business during an economic downturn.

Here are five ways that you can focus your SEO in order to build a powerful and effective strategy during this uncertain economic time.

Build trust with your content strategy

Consumers want to know that they can trust in the reliability of your products and services more than ever during an unstable time. Focus on updating information content as it strengthens brand affinity, trust and conversions. Make sure content is relatable and using more video content will be a good way to engage more with your customers.

Update your Google My Business Listing

Every business should have a decent presence online so that your customer can easily find and learn about your business, especially during this time where the pandemic has greatly affected brick and mortar businesses. Make sure you, therefore, update your Google My Business Listings so that you can direct your customers to your business location even if they have not yet landed on your website. Ensure your business description, details and business hours are up to date and make sure you have some good reviews as these matter the most when it comes to conversions.

Update your upcoming campaigns

It is more important than ever to be sensitive to and show empathy for your customer’s needs at this time by producing appropriate content when launching any campaign. It would be better to pull a campaign completely than release one that is tone-deaf to the current situation. So make sure you have analysed any upcoming campaigns, and change them if needed.

Optimise your security

There has been a recent boom in hackers using malware to exploit even large corporate organisations, by spreading malicious spam campaigns related to the Coronavirus outbreak. Be aware of this and update your security accordingly. You can do this by:

- Identifying how crawlers are accessing your website

- Updating your plug-ins and tools

- Secure your site with SLL. Implementing HTTPS will help you in attaining high rankings and your site will be more secure for browsing.

- Configure the security systems with SSO (Single Sign On).

Forecast for post-pandemic.

Make sure you are being proactive and producing a plan for how your business can bounce back even stronger post-pandemic. What will be your customer’s expectations once this is over and how can you meet these expectations. Having a strong SEO strategy will help. Faced with a global recession, most marketers will agree that a focus on SEO is essential for raising ROI. Organic SEO is the key for the long term impact under this pandemic crisis and you need to make sure to create a buzz. Ensure you are on the minds of your customers by ramping up your SEO!