When life gives you lemons… making the most out of the Coronavirus environment.
The COVID-19 outbreak is affecting many businesses with a downturn in clients and work coming in.
Small businesses, as well as large, are being impacted by the changes in consumer behaviour.
However, during this time, an opportunity exists to make some improvements to your business. Now may be a window to invest time in your online presence to ensure that when the enquiries and sales start to pick up again – you are at the top of the search results.
If you are in a position where your work has dropped off, we challenge you to think about the things that you usually don’t have time for, that you can now prioritize to improve your online presence and other business processes for the near future.
Here is our “Make the most of the COVID-19 situation” To-Do list:
1. Blog
Blogging often falls to the very bottom of many peoples’ to-do lists, however it is a very effective way to add valuable SEO content to your website.
During this time, think about ways you can stockpile content that can be used at a later date. Brainstorm blog post ideas, then research and write them, saving as drafts so you can publish them on a schedule down the track – allowing you to continue blogging when work picks up again.
Blogging gives you powerful opportunities to use keywords, add outbound links, create internal links back to your products or services, and create unique content to promote on your social media channels – driving traffic back to your website.
Depending on your business, you could also think about opportunities that may exist to write a guest post for someone else. Are you an expert in your field, and could you create content that might be interesting to another audience?
Another thing you can do is get your portfolio up to date. When busy, it is hard to find the time to update the projects, or portfolio part of your website, so now would be a great time to get that area of your website current. Remember to always add a written description about the work to increase your SEO opportunities.
2. Improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Another thing that business owners often run out of time for, is effectively search engine optimizing their website content – images, pages, posts, products and the website content itself.
Use this time to review your website and see where you can add or improve SEO content.
NOTE: For all of these, keep in mind your target keywords (the search terms that you want people to be able to find you in Google with) and make sure you use these words and phrases often in all of the places below:
- Image ALT text
Have you added unique ALT text to all of your images? - Meta content
Have you written custom meta titles and descriptions for every new page, post, product or portfolio entry? - Website content
Is your website content up-to-date and does it use your target keywords?
You may review your website and realise that your business has changed a bit since you wrote your content, or that the content isn’t keyword-rich – so that would be a good opportunity to work through your site and make some improvements. - New pages
Are there opportunities to add more pages about your company? Creating pages for specific services is a good way to improve your SEO (rather than having a single page that promotes all services in one place). - Product listings
Are your product description content-rich? Consider if there are ways you can add more informative descriptions into your products. Are there secondary descriptions you could write that use related keywords, or provide more positive sales points for your products?
Take a step back and put yourself in the mind of a potential customer. Think about the overall visual presentation as well – this could be a good time to take some new product images and improve the way your products are presented online.
3. Do some background tasks
- Ensure you have connected Google Analytics to your website
This allows you to closely monitor your website traffic and also user behaviour. - Monitor your business name for back link opportunities
- Set up a Google Alert– Google offers a free tool called “Google Alerts” that allows you to be notified anytime someone mentions your brand. This allows you to stay on top of any new mentions of you, and check that they have included a back link to you. If they haven’t this is an opportunity for them to link to your website – and feel free to ask them to link to a specific page (such as the relevant blog post) rather than just the homepage.
- Google yourself – manually search for your name or brand online to see if anyone has mentioned you. Once you have found an image or a mention without a hyperlink, contact the website owner and ask if you could please have a back link
- Set up a newsletter
Create a free account with Mailchimp and set up your template. You can also import any email addresses of people who have authorised you to contact them (be sure to read the Requirements & Best Practices for Audiences article here). You are then ready to send emails to any existing subscribers, or add a sign-up form to your website to start building your list. - Business process improvements
Are there any business documents that you could create to improve your processes, such as workflows? Or could you improve client documents such as contracts or information sheets?
We encourage you to look for all the opportunities that exist to improve your business during this uncertain time.
There are many more than we have listed here – but we hope that this can provide some inspiration for you to push ahead, rather than pull back.
