The Coronavirus emergency will end, and there will be a
slow, progressive and complete recovery. Here are a number of tips for
important tasks to do now, now.
Do you remember when in the past, when faced with a good idea,
you thought "I don't have time to do all this"? Well, now you have
the time. Put into practice the good ideas you have set aside so far.
Summary
Which budget for SEO & Digital Marketing
How does the budget for SEO & Digital Marketing change
during the coronavirus emergency?
Digital Marketing that you have always postponed
1. Interview your customers and staff
2. Make a mini-audit of your content published so far
3. Prepare webinar
4. Place things you have never put in order
5. Check the competition SEO
6. Produce video
7. Work on your reputation
8. Update your google my business profile for local
customers
9. Check and eliminate toxic links
10. Keep in contact with your audience
11. Find out more traffic data and statistics
Which Budget For SEO
& Digital Marketing
Normally, if your company invoices from € 1M to € 5M, then
you spend an average of 7-8% on marketing and advertising (US Small Business
Administration statistics).
If you are a start-up or if you are in a phase of strong
initial growth, perhaps you can also afford 10-12%, but spending 7% of your
turnover on marketing and advertising is normal. Aren't you spending 7% of your
marketing revenue? You have a problem.
How Does The Budget
For SEO & Digital Marketing Change During The Coronavirus Emergency?
It doesn't change . It is important that during this crisis
you keep this balance, and continue to communicate and stimulate your target by
making communication, in particular digital communication .
Of course, you have to cut and dismiss all communications
and adv that are incompatible with the restrictions we are experiencing for a
while. It makes no sense, e.g. to encourage your target audience to show up in
your store if people are forced to stay at home. These communications,
especially if they are paid adv, must be set aside for now.
Surely this is a time when the pure promotion of products
and services must be reduced, almost eliminated, or in any case adapted to the
situation; but it is equally certain that when the emergency ends there will be
a complete , slow, but certain recovery of activities . Until then
communication must necessarily reduce the tones. But not the activities.
Digital Marketing
That You Have Always Postponed
There are digital marketing actions and above all SEO that
can be carried out already now. Long-term ones. Do you remember when in the
past, when faced with a good idea, you thought "I don't have time to do
all this"? Well, now you have the time. Put into practice the good ideas
you have set aside so far.
Prepare and refine the basics of Digital Marketing and
SEO in your digital communication. Make sure
you have built a process and a flow that produces quality content that is able
to position yourself well, to constantly measure results, to have a reference
audience.
Then, here are 11 actions you can perform with your agency,
or with your internal team. These Digital Marketing actions can be carried out
in teams even in isolation, or working remotely.
1. Interview Your
Customers and Staff
Interview your customers, your team, your staff, asking them
what their experience has been in relation to your products, services, or to
the values you transmit with your work. Contact them by videocall. Record
videos with Zoom, Google Hangouts, Skype. Tip to be faster: if you want,
automate the transcription of the audio with Otter.ai or with the Dictate
function of Microsoft Word.
In the coming months, these transcripts and related videos
will become a very rich source of information and inspiration for your posts ,
social content, draft for exchanging posts with other sites, etc.
2. Make A Mini-Audit
Of Your Content Published So Far
Full control of your content published so far is a long and
complex undertaking, but there is a lot of information that can also be
obtained with a simple mini-audit, aimed at improving the performance of your
content published so far.
First of all, if you don't have a list of the content you've
published so far, this is the time to produce it. Just a Google Sheet or Excel
sheet; create a sheet for each of the following types of content:
·
Web pages
·
Blog Post
·
Email / DEM
·
Whitepapers / tutorials / guides
·
Ebook
·
presentations
·
Video
·
infographics
·
Articles you have published elsewhere
If you have the chance, you can also write down articles
about your company that other sites have published. Now evaluate for each
content:
·
Which texts and images are of higher quality,
such as to reproduce them on other channels?
·
What content got the most shares? Which ones got
the most backlinks?
·
Which ones generated the most traffic on the
site?
Once these evaluations are made, these opportunities are
created for you:
·
Update
old content with new notes
·
Optimize the most effective content with key
keywords and new call-to-actions
·
In the most effective content, add links to new
products and services
·
Plan to relaunch the best content when the
business recovers
3. Prepare Webinar
If you have free time, this is the right time to learn how
to prepare and conduct webinars . Talk about the details of your products,
introduce new people, inspire your audience about what they can do or have from
your business when it is all over.
Making webinars during this stop period could be a
particularly effective tactic especially in B2B, because the other
professionals your interlocutors are equally free from pressing occupations,
and available to see / meet other new people, even on video.
If you've never done webinars before, this is a great guide
to webinars. 37 tips for successful webinars
4. Place Things You
Have Never Put In Order
Here are some tasks you should do that you haven't done for
a long time:
·
Reorder
your administration: clean and reorder your files. Erase the things you no
longer need. Close contracts that no longer have hopes.
·
Website:
writing those evergreen posts that you promised yourself to write; delete from
the posts those keywords and those expressions of long ago that are no longer
in theme with your target and your business.
·
Webinar
and Podcast: Get updated on how to make webinars and podcasts , try on, and
lay out ideas for how to use them in the future
·
Books:
Start reading that pile of marketing books that you bought and put aside
5. Check The
Competition SEO
For a long time you remained focused on your business, on
your site, on your results, on your SEO. Now you can take a look at the
competition. Check the search results on Google - SERP - of searches with your
main keywords and try to understand why competitors are better positioned than
you .
Examine their texts, keywords, metatexts, if they use
rich-text, plugins for reviews, how many backlinks they have, and get an
estimate of their traffic, compared to yours. To do all this you can use
semi-free tools such as SeoZoom, SemRush, Moz, Majestic, ScreamingFrog, Ahrefs.
Write down what you find, evaluate if it is applicable to
your context, and set it as a target for future
digital
marketing actions.
6. Produce Video
Videos are an exceptionally effective tool for your digital
marketing. They can help you:
Improve positioning on long tail keywords
Appear in Google SERPs with particular and distinctive
snippets
Appear in (numerous!) Searches on YouTube
Above all, videos are also the basis for producing other
content . Making a post by publishing the video and transcribing word for word
is just one of the possible contents that you can derive from a video. You can
also comment on what has been expressed; you can acquire images and use them in
social media. You can take video fragments with the main phrases expressed in
the video and plan to publish them later on instagram. You can post sentences
in other posts, by quoting the video.
7. Work On Your
Reputation
The digital reputation of your company is the sum of what
others say about you in the various digital channels.
Make sure there is someone who regularly checks all the
channels where your target might talk about you; make sure there are thanks for
the good speaker, and professional responses to negative comments.
Make sure there is a shared policy to manage answers to any
questions that are asked. Prepare response templates for common questions.
Prepare people to respond to negative comments , and to
escalate, when necessary, to the correct people.
Consider whether some tools can help people monitor better ,
faster and faster.
Start the practice of a monthly report that measures the
main reputation data.
8. UPDATE YOUR GOOGLE MY BUSINESS PROFILE FOR LOCAL
CUSTOMERS
Have you changed your working hours? Have you taken special
precautions to avoid Covid-19 contagion? Google rewards companies that use
Google MyBusiness tools with better positioning to let their users know that
they have changed something. Also update only the times and closings, and your
positioning will improve.
Also, regularly post posts with updates or offers, and make
sure your contact information is complete and correct.
9. Check and
Eliminate Toxic Links
Searching for and removing toxic links on external sites is
an activity that is not very frequent, and it does not happen at all; yet, if
you happen to suddenly receive thousands of links from a spam site, it may
happen that your site suddenly "precipitates" in its positioning, for
no apparent reason. Likewise, by identifying and eliminating toxic links you
can achieve an unthinkable leap in positioning.
Checking and eliminating toxic links is a task that requires
time, patience and several checks. This may be the time to both do your first
check of toxic links and set up a regular checkup practice .
Use Moz and Majestic to check the nature of the links to
your site. If you notice a large number of toxic links, you can intervene with
Google Search Console and perform the "disavow" action of those links.
In this post How to Find Unnatural Links to Your Site &
What to Do About Them , you will find a clear introduction to how to operate to
control and limit toxic links.
10. Keep In Contact
With Your Audience
Staying digitally in touch with your audience during a
pandemic is an unprecedented issue. We can venture that it depends on your
business sector, on the relationship you have established, and on the purpose
of communication. Here are some suggestions.
If your customers are used to hearing you regularly via
email / DEM, direct message or social media, do not absent yourself , do not
neglect the relationship.
Definitely, avoid exploiting the disaster to promote
products or services.
Think creatively, and think about how you can offer
reassurance , social connection or even tangible assistance during an
emergency. For example, you can launch a live video appointment once a week,
talk about the trends in your sector, and possible future specific actions
related to your product or service.
If you have built a very large audience, offer to make it
available to the authorities for important messages and communications. Public
functions are not always able to promptly contact large masses of users, and
help in this regard could be invaluable.
Tell your customers how your business is changing , how you
are adapting it and how you are protecting your staff. Encourage conversation
and anticipate answers to more predictable questions.
11. Find out more
traffic data and statistics
Take a closer look at the statistics you have so far only
glimpsed. What do you know about your customers? Why didn't some choose you? In
general, why don't those who should choose you do it? What can there be in the
statistics that you have missed so far? Maybe they all visit the site with an
iPhone? Or do they mainly come from a specific city? Can this tell you
something?
Compare trends online and offline, and identify what you
could fix right now and have never had time to do.