A year and a half after the COVID pandemic begun, we can reflect on the impact it has had not only on the world but also on SEO. It’s a given that everyone has been affected by the pandemic – what’s interesting to note is the different ways in which it has. Our lifestyles drastically changed in a matter of days. As the pandemic locked us in our houses and moved us online, our habits also shifted very quickly.
The biggest change was probably a massive shift to online shopping, according to Searchmetrics online sales in 2020 were up 44% compared with 2019, meaning that many e-commerce sites including Amazon, eBay and Etsy excelled during 2020. However, a dramatic increase has its downsides as well – in the near future the e-commerce companies might see a natural decline in sales as everything opens back up and people start shopping in stores more. So, we, as SEOs, will have the job of reporting that to our clients. In the long-term though, it will be a good thing for SEO, because the general trend of shopping online more often will stay with us and people will be spending more time online.
Says SEOMG!’s Luke Smith: “There’s been a massive shift to people being online more, for example, because the shops were closed. Everyone, even those who never shopped online before such as older people, was forced to shop online for the most part.”
“This is good for us because e-commerce is something we want to tap into in the near future. We don’t have any purely e-commerce clients at the moment though unless you count Reed Courses, and their revenue doubled during the first lockdown. As a result of that, there is now a bigger audience for online shopping long-term. But then there is obviously the other side of spectrum – the companies that lost out massively, e.g. high street shops, travel, etc. But overall the pandemic helped SEO – and incidentally our SEO agency here in Brighton.”
Another big change last year was the fact that we had to stay at home, so travelling wasn’t even on the radar, and, as you can imagine, all the companies in the travel industry struggled massively. They had to rethink their whole marketing strategy, a lot of them stopped using SEM and Paid Ads, as it required extra budget that they didn’t have; but they still wanted to keep their marketing going somehow, so that people didn’t forget about them travel restrictions were lifted.
That’s where SEO came in, because it’s something you can really benefit from and if everything’s done right it’s highly likely to bring positive results without any expensive media spend. It’s a very powerful tool for a sustainable, long-term marketing strategy. With a well thought-out SEO strategy you can ultimately get the traffic you were previously buying for free and that’s its biggest power. Here at SEOMG! we help you do just that.
It wasn’t only our clients who struggled last year. We had to overcome some difficulties ourselves. Contract delays, reduced hours, not being able to meet with our clients in person, difficulties during reporting – it was all extremely challenging but we handled it well and it made us more resilient and experienced. Looking back at it, we are glad we had that unplanned time off at the very beginning of the business to do all the operational tasks needed to be done to set up a company.
Despite being founded in the midst of the pandemic and faced with some difficulties, our agency managed to build up a diverse portfolio of clients from different industries including vulnerable ones that struggled the most but saw a real value in SEO. They understood that the work done during the hard times will pay off once demand returns, so they kept working with us. In doing so, one of our clients moved more than 50% of their traffic from SEM and Paid Ads to SEO.
Get in touch below to see how we can help you do the same.
