We know that the health crisis caused by Covid-19 has changed the way we live, and also the way we market and sell.
With this content I want to bring you closer to a slightly different way of doing SEO: not based on organic positioning, on specific keywords or on links.
It’s possible? Of course you do, and if you work in a digital newspaper, you already know a little about what this is about.
Trends as an SEO strategy
Many times with experience, we think that SEO is a fairly exact science, since there is certain data, such as volumes or difficulty, that allow us to have certain predictability in growth.
But this time I am going to talk about doing SEO from another approach where aspects that we consider a ‘must’ in SEO go to the background.
We are talking about doing SEO through trends, search intentions and user response.
Here our main ‘ranking factors’ will be deep knowledge of our customers, intuition, trial and error, anticipation and time.
The tips that we will see below are not an ordered roadmap, but rather a series of actions or considerations that will give you a way to act when you see that something is moving in the world and you want to take advantage of it.
Think that crises are also opportunities.
Let’s see how to take advantage of them in your marketing strategy.
There is no data, use your intuition
As we have said, there is no data here to start from, only facts.
That is why in these cases your greatest ally will be your intuition and your knowledge of customers.
There’s a lot of talk about Data-Driven, but marketing is mostly creativity and strategy, so don’t ever forget this.
We start with this in mind: when there are current issues, there always a lot of questions around them and that is where you should start attacking.
Analyze the problem or situation that exists and how it affects your customer target.
From here you will be able to ask many questions that you can begin to solve in a post or content type FAQs.
Some examples:
What consequences can it bring for the country if Trump does not want to leave the White House?
What kind of help do I have if I close my company because of the Coronavirus?
Can I work if I am quarantined at home?
Why has Bitcoin gone up in the last month?
Questions and answers are your workhorse
This will be your main way to start and your main asset when it comes to using trends and fresh content to grow.
A trick to be able to attract more traffic is that the questions are a heading within your content and that they contain the keyword that surrounds everything that has caused the crisis (Covid, USA Elections, Bitcoin, etc.)
With this you will have more possibilities of capturing featured snippets or appearing in the other questions of users.
Also keep in mind that doing a question and answer content usually generates more questions with which you can take advantage in two ways:
- Introduce the most recurring questions in the content as a new part.
- Offer personalized help to try to convert people who have problems into customers.
Anticipate the facts
You do not need to be the best but you need to be the most specific when answering what users need.
Once you have the questions about the tendency to attack: How can I work from home? What helps exist in the agricultural sector? Can I take my children to school during quarantine? What happens if someone in my company is infected?, … Answer them so that you can open up new and deeper questions.
To do this, leave the door open for your users to leave theirs.
Another way to start is by using Google Suggest or related searches at the bottom of the SERPs, watching the news and social networks. Analyze which are the most common questions that users ask or what news appears.
Tools like Buzzsumo and ahrefs Content Explorer can also help you in this search.
After doing some initial research, start by visiting reliable sources of information and use that information to answer any questions that arise if possible.
Follow the news in the search engines
This is key since they will be your greatest allies.
Likewise, you will not be able to compete with this type of media for its volume, but keep in mind that this type of media is generalist and in your case you are trying to limit the questions to your market niche.
Do searches like {your market} or {your target audience} + the main keyword to see what you find. For example: shops + bitcoin
Unfold topics and refine questions thanks to Search Console
As we said there is no data at the beginning, but once you start, Search Console will give you those precious keywords and searches that people carry out.
The words that you can get from here will allow you to refine the questions more exactly and allow you to draw new topics from the initials thanks to finding repetition patterns of searches and impressions.
[Ebook] Le technical SEO pour les esprits non techniques
Bring trends to your territory
Getting traffic is fine but the best thing is if you get the traffic you capture to be related to your customer target in some way.
Think that in crises they always tend to pose problems and opportunities for different groups in society.
If you have a B2B company, think about the situations in which this crisis can affect companies in your sector and how you can respond to their problems.
You have to become a kind of newspaper
By this we mean that you must update your content often, even several times a day as you get more data or new information about it is published.
Updating the date and content will be key to signaling Google and users that what you publish is current and up to date with what is happening.
Build content hubs
Once you start creating more content related to the event of the moment you can start building content hubs.
For example, if there are specific aids on a crisis, identify if there are specific ones for your market niche such as companies, businesses, retail or local markets, regions, etc.
This type of content will make users browse longer and give a broader vision of what they can find on your website.
Take advantage of trends to enhance your other content
This is key because you know that trends are temporary, with which you take advantage of to enhance content that are key within your content strategy.
Try to link evergreen content or those that give you a better result in your marketing strategy so that the efforts are worth it in the long term.
Even if you have a lot of traction with this strategy, you can consider attacking market niches that are not your target a priori, either because they are competitive or because positioning under normal conditions would take a lot of time and effort.
Offer something to your visitors with which you can get their contact
Finally, try that each visit you have can become your potential client trying to get their contact.
Offer resources or any help that allows you to be in contact with these people who have visited you.
It is clear that they have visited you for a specific matter but thanks to this you can finally make them your clients.
You can offer a downloadable, a webinar, take them to an automation, a discount, …
A real case
Here is a small example of a B2B SaaS in which we anticipate what would come with the pandemic.
March 14 is when the country was closed due to the health crisis. This was announced a few days before with what we anticipated would be the most serious problems that our potential clients would face and we did an extensive question and answer content.
We kept it updated daily and thanks to the indications and news we finally created more than 10 articles related to the subject.
This strategy allowed us to reach daily peaks of x10 in the traffic we had been having, which was already good, and over time it allowed us to multiply x4 the traffic we had before this action thanks to enhancing with this strategy, by interlinking other articles and the creation of others of greater difficulty or that were core for us.
I know that this strategy may have a certain factor of chance but think that digital media live off the news and are one of the most visited places on the Internet.
Try to keep a vision of what is happening and what may affect your sector and try to take advantage of trends in your sector. The more you do it, the more times you can see these signs and replicate strategies of this type.
