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To say everything is pretty crazy right now is an understatement, for most businesses it is a very worrying time. Of course, everyone is worried about loved ones and the vulnerable people in our society but it is also fair to say business owners are worried about dropping revenue and more. However, it is critical to remember that just because people are staying at home, just because public gatherings are stopped and everything is in chaos; Google doesn’t stop. This may seem obvious but it is critical that business owners who rely on Google as a source of leads take this on board and act on it.
What is Google doing?
Well, Google spends it’s days sending out millions of web crawlers, bots, spiders…whatever you want to call them, to crawl and index all the pages on your website and everyone else’s. It then uses this information to essentially rank every page against any search term anyone may type in. This is hugely simplified but you get the idea. It uses highly complex mathematical algorithms to asses a range of factors on each site and off site factors too. This all goes into the mix and you get your positions against search terms. This is going to keep happening 24 hours a day regardless of Coronavirus and regardless of pretty much anything else barring Google’s data centres being destroyed or closed.
What does this mean for businesses?
It means, no matter how tough business is, no matter whether you close your doors, send your staff home or are super busy you still rank (or not) and appear (or not) in Google search results.
Yes, but why is this important?
Here is the bottom line.If you rely even partly on traffic from Google search for leads, enquires or sales then you must continue to look after your rankings. It is so easy to forget that all the time we are self isolating, bulk buying toilet role, pretending it’s OK to drink a bottle of wine every night or lying in a dark room watching Netflix and feeling terrible, Google is assessing, indexing and ranking your site and those of your competitors.
When it's all over
If we look ahead to things getting back to normal we will notice people will start spending money again, people will want your services or products. But what if you no longer rank? That would make a terrible period into a potentially permanently terrible situation. It is hard,and it will get harder, but as a business you must keep working on your rankings. Keep writing blogs, keep checking rankings and keep doing your SEO thang!
Of course, search traffic will tank, we know that, people are not going to be searching in the same way they normally do. So to this end, it is important to not look too much at search traffic in Google Analytics. but do get your SEO people to keep tracking rankings and to keep working hard on your site.
From a business point of view, the only thing that will make this whole situation worse is coming out the end of it and realise you are no longer ranking well. You may even see a boom, you may even use this time to gain some ground on competitors…you may even come out of this in better shape than you went in. but all of this depends on maintaining any level of SEO you can afford.