The Importance of SEO and Marketing in Pandemic Times

Since March 2020 last year, things started to get more complicated and a little bit more difficult for many businesses. It was in March last year when the world lived its first lockdown for a period where non-essential shops and many businesses had to be closed, such as bakeries, restaurants, clothes shops, or book shops.  So, what would happen next? Small businesses on the high streets realized that they need to reinvent themselves and find new formulas to keep their way of life afloat.

So that many owners started to ask themselves. What can we do during these times to keep our business? What does it need to be done? The key for many small businesses these days is clearly to set a website, advertise your business on social media and start thinking about selling things online whenever it is possible. For instance, restaurants can still offer takeaway food, many coffee shops can sell coffee and snacks to go and they ca<…n advertise in social media websites or on their own website. Keeping these things up<dated it will be very helpful for the company. Other types of nonessential shops, such as>>website and start selling online.  Now is the time to start to boost your company and give a step towards digitalization. 

When creating a website for your businesses, someone should answer to itself, how can clients see your website online? How can your website be visible online and that appears in the search engines? 

This is what is known in marketing as SEO, which means Web Search Optimization. Applying some SEO techniques can help your website to be more visible online, attract more views and traffic, meaning that more people will see your business and you have more chances of getting a more positive outcome. The most visible your website will be in the search engines; the easier will be to attract more clients and more possible clients to your shop. However, this is not always an easy task, and to get your website in the first’s position or in the first page of the search in Google can take some time and dedication, sometimes it can be years until the websites can appear on the first’s entries. 

SEO is a part of digital marketing and it is seeing as a marketing tool. SEO is now a very spread and popular tool used worldwide by many big companies. They are investing a lot in SEO and SEM campaigns in other to increase their levels of traffic to their websites. One of these types of websites that have been investing in these types of SEM campaigns have been the meta-search engines, that is websites such as Booking.com, Trivago.com or Hotels.com. Metasearch engines invest a lot of money and time in SEO techniques since they base their marketing on online sales. Most people nowadays make bookings online, this number is getting higher each year, and the statists show us that around 85 percent of people have been booking hotels online. Even though if this seems as something that big companies can do by investing time and effort in it, there are some types of SEO rules that can help any business and any website following the next steps. 

1. GET A GOOD DESIGN AND LOGO FOR YOUR BUSINESS 

EO web design is the ideal balance between a visually attractive website design, meeting all the criteria of usability and web accessibility, and at the same time s following a well-developed web positioning strategy in Internet search engines such as Google. To get a more attractive content it is recommended that the website has been structured in three visible parts, the top part, the middle part and the bottom part. Keywords should appear on the website as high as possible. Once you have your keywords in mind, you must insert them into your website in the most natural way as possible and always at the top. The position of the words is important in SEO. That is why it is recommended that the name of your URL already contains a keyword, as well as the titles and headings. If you use an image as a header, you can give it the name of the most relevant keyword as the title. A good logo design and a modern outlook of the website will also help to improve your website. 

2. SPECIFY CLEARLY WHAT TYPE OF SERVICES YOUR WEBSITE IS OFFERING.

This is an important step since specifying and presenting a clear information about your business will help the website to improve and be more attractive. If is a restaurant, hairdresser, coffee shop or book shop, it is important to have this information in the first part of your website. Having a good content will help the search engines to get better information on the website and show it in the search results. In the middle part of the website, the most important content is shown pictures or all the images that you need for your business. Find a good balance between image and text. We know that images are more attractive. However, it is more difficult for Google to locate you with images than with text. Add enough text so that it contains the main keywords that explain what your website is about. Also, if you use images and videos, use them sparingly and check that they are well optimized and have a good loading speed. 

3. LOCAL POSITIONING 

You cannot miss the opportunity to position yourself locally, especially if you are a small or medium-sized company, it may be the best way out of the furious competition in the markets. If you decide to sell books online from your bookstore, you can position yourself by “book shop online Oxford” or “novels to sell online in Oxford” and try to position yourself as best you can locally. 

You must register in directories such as: Google My Business, Bing maps, Yellow Pages, QDQ, FourSquare, Yalwa, Yelp, Opendi, Infobel or Hotfrog among others which will help your business to appear in the local searches. 

4. USE RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN

Responsive web design is about creating web pages that look good on all devices. A responsive web design consists of adjusting automatically to the screen size of different devices such as laptops, phones, or tablets. This is a web design and development technique that using flexible structures (flexible containers, flexible images, and video) and together with Media Queries specified in CSS, manages to adapt a website to the environment of the device in which it is located. With this technique, the content of your site design looks good and can be quite legible for users on the device with which it interacts. 

Data indicates that the majority of users use search engines from tablets and smartphones, and fewer and fewer users are browsing with a PC. Therefore, when making your website, it is recommended that you opt for a responsive design that adapts to the screen size. Otherwise, you will have to make a mobile version of your website to improve the search engine optimisation of your web.