Coronavirus & SEO: Its Impact in traffic and business, and the actions to Take as an SEO Specialist

Welcome to another special edition of Crawling Mondays. In today's edition, I wanted to take the opportunity that I am talking lately with Nitin, with Gianluca, with David, and we are all, whether in-house or consultants, working across different sectors as SEOs. So I wanted to start this conversation with them about what we are seeing about the impact of coronavirus across our different types of companies that we work with. And on the other hand, how we are handling, how we are focusing our work in order to keep the clients, in order to work if we see a negative situation or a negative trend. So hopefully this can also be helpful for many of you. But before that, I wanted to introduce, in case you don't know them somehow, Gianluca Fiorelli, who's an international SEO consultant who has tons of experience in the travel market, especially in Italy, right? He's based in Spain but has a lot of clients in Italy. Then David Ibano, he works at then known as an in-house SEO and also has tons of experience as an in-house SEO across many international classifieds marketplaces type of websites. And Nityin Ashanda, who's in Berlin. He has worked a lot also in the travel industry in the past, in the ecommerce industry, and now is working at Allmio as an in-house SEO. So hello everybody, how are you? We have already been in lockdown in many countries for 2 weeks and since this started, coronavirus lockdowns and restrictions started already 2 weeks and a half ago. So it's true that at the beginning, the very obvious negative effect started to happen with the travel sector, travel industry, people cancelling their plans. I have a client website, the one travel client that I have that saw a huge spike in traffic, not in rankings but in traffic. This was people cancelling that went down after a few days. And now even if the rankings are still the same, realistically the traffic has never been unfortunately so low. What are the impacts that you are seeing directly in the industries that you work? If you can share more about it, what you are seeing in general. Right.

Yeah, absolutely. I think I can start because we're talking about travel and I work in that industry only. And for us, it started happening after the 3rd week of February, more or less. And we start in the beginning, we were seeing 20-25% week over week drop. And now the business is down 95%. So this is a huge dent. And I think travel is one of the most affected industries due to this situation.

In your case, you provided the option that the users went ahead and directly canceled their bookings, or how did you manage that?

Yes, absolutely. For us, customer is very important. Every user we want to, you know, just when we get a user, we want to keep this user forever. So for that, we wanted to basically serve nice user experience even in this situation. So we have a landing page where we have all the providers. So you can speak with them for cancellations. And if they don't provide cancellation, they don't help you, then we help you there. So that's what we do. And then in fact, interestingly, here in our company, a lot of different teams are now helping customer support. Even from SEO team, there are people who are joining customer support for helping with emails and other stuff where they can help. Where everyone is now customer support and helping users with good user experience even in this situation so that when demand is back again, they come back to Omeo because of this lovely experience. And then they stay with us forever.

In your case, Gianluca, you have clients also in Italy?

I have 2 clients. One is still active, one put me on hold because of the situation. One of these clients is a small OTA. Let's say, but they specialize on a specific region, very touristic region of Italy like Sardinia, like Puglia. The impact was terrifying in the sense that in Italy they start really in February, all of the negative impact of COVID If we look to the traffic here, over here, the percentage of decrease, especially in organic traffic, is essentially the same. Presented by Natein. It's around between 80-90% of traffic, which is terrifying because as you were saying too, their rankings never were so wonderful. I mean, in a normal situation, this would have been a really nice start of summer season. However, in order to not get too much depressed looking at the year-over-year statistics, I started to look more on week over week statistics in order to see search behavior changes. And in this sense, I started to see something positive, especially week over week.

It seems that it reached a bottom already and it's starting to increase a little by little.

Exactly. This is the case of this OTA, which is substantially selling vacations. And finally, I have a client that is in the insurance sector and they are still growing year over year and still growing week over week.

I guess I'm in a different position because we actually manufacture products. So, we obviously do see an increase in people looking for our products, typically because people are shifting to more online commerce. But again, it's not consistent across all markets. I guess some markets see— and usually it comes down to how advanced they are in e-commerce— some markets see reasonable uplifts and others see moderate. So, it's not a sort of perfect thing where everyone sees the same type of uplift. But one of the things which I am seeing, I've got a couple of travel websites which are probably a bit shitty when it comes to it. I managed to get some optimisation around coronavirus content and a lot of it was around people just needing information.

It's interesting what you mentioned regarding you seeing still a good trend in your sector and it makes sense because you work with a food and first necessity type of product, right? We all still need to keep eating. And this is what I saw, it was shared and it's completely reasonable, right? It starts with a negative trend of those sectors that were more connected with us coming together. The events, for example, websites like Meetups or Eventbrite or this type of websites. We can't— not only the travel ones, but the concerts. We can all expect to see a decrease in traffic because realistically we cannot go anywhere together, right? Unfortunately. But now beyond those more obvious sector. It's about we are stuck at home, we are working, so we start consuming and we see data that has been shared from Semrush, from Similarweb about peak in traffic of online communication software, collaboration software, project management software that is cloud-based, of course, because we need to work online and many companies have been pushed to work completely from home to keep going. But then on the other hand, we are also seeing those sectors that are not of first necessity that have had also a negative impact. Because of course, if a lot of people have been laid off, a lot of people have this uncertainty that they don't know what is going to happen to their jobs in the midterm, they are not continuing consuming. So for example, ecommerce websites that I have access to of luxury type of brand or marketplaces, we can see that the traffic is not as down as many in the travel sector indeed, but we can see that people have stopped They are not thinking right now of buying new t-shirts.

It does depend on the vertical. So I know we saw the demand for toilet paper massively spike through the roof.

First necessity though.

But even things such as home gyms. So I know in the UK where a lot of people are seeing 2 to 3 month delivery timeframes now. In the Netherlands, we're seeing 1 week, 2 weeks. But now a lot of the gym equipment in the Netherlands is now sold out because people are building home gyms.

Yeah.

Also in electronics, for example, the game system, the Switches.

Wait, what?

Yeah, indeed. It depends on the vertical of the ecommerce, what they sell. But in general, if it is not first necessity and those systems that will keep us entertained, also streaming services, those that will allow us to keep entertained. So for example, in my case, what I was referring more was like, for example, for clothing or backpacks or shoes. I think that nobody's I'm thinking right now of buying clothes to go to parties, for example.

So here's a fun thing, and I had a bit of a rant on Twitter about this. So I bought a pair of sunglasses from Vision Express in the UK, and I've got a warranty on them, but I need to visit their store physically in London in order to do my warranty. I can't do anything online. Versus I went to one of the retailers in the US, GlassesUSA, they managed to manufacture and ship them to my house in under 6 days. I think it's the fact that there's obviously going to be a shift in demand, but I think a lot of the times if the retailers don't have the ability to adapt and don't have the content such as, do we still do delivery? So, I think the problem is some of these retailers that could survive, and again, I'm moving to tactics, but if you're already locking up those channels and refusing to deal with consumers and saying, look, sorry, it's a bit too busy, Which is not answering any social media questions anymore, you're basically cutting your throat. So I think there are businesses that will choose to adapt.

Let's talk about that. What are the goods and bads, but the ones that we are seeing that are being dealt in a positive and a negative way? Nitin, how are you trying to work around this?

The good thing for us is SEO is a channel which can also survive in this kind of situation because it's a midterm to long-term solution. And here you're not talking about only low-hanging fruits. So for us, it was a strategic change. And whenever we plan our quarters, we plan a good mix of short-term wins, medium-term, and long-term wins. And here in this case, what we did was, so we removed most of the low-hanging fruits for now. So we are focusing more on midterm and then long-term solutions. For example, site speed. It's a very good topic. So we're working on that. And then internal linking. So we are fixing the entire internal linking system that we have. and similar initiatives. That's one thing on a strategic side. And then we are also planning to save some cash because this is a situation where we don't want to burn all the cash. And we keep some budget for testing tools all the time. So we have stopped all those initiatives. We are not testing new tools anymore. And we also plan to have some upgrades, tool upgrades. We have stopped that as well because right now I think we can survive with whatever we have. So we do not need upgrades. So we are not doing that. And then we were also doing some really expensive outreach campaigns for generating some high-quality backlinks organically. So we have stopped all those campaigns as well. For example, Euro 2020, it's not happening. So we save a lot of money there. And there are other initiatives we were working on. So we have stopped all those initiatives and saved a lot of money. And then we were also working with some freelancers, consultants on some fancy-to-have things, not like basics, fancy-to-have things. So basics, we are definitely working in-house and all these fancy-to-have things are kind of on hold for now. So that's how we are saving some money and focusing on long-term initiatives.

So you have gone back to the fundamental, the structural evergreen type of areas that you know that were there the whole time and now you have a little bit more resources to focus on those.

If I generalize all this, I would say SEO is a marathon. It's not a sprint. And you should think about it as one bad phase of your marathon. So just save your energy, run a bit slow, and then use this energy in the next phases and then win essentially. So that's what we are focusing on at the moment.

I love that metaphor. SEO is actually a marathon and it should be like that. Actually, we are very lucky in SEO because yes, of course we have been hurt, but I can't imagine the professionals that are consultants or agencies focusing only on paid search. Because realistically what I have seen with a couple of clients of mine is that of course they have stopped all of their paid search initiatives because they won't pay for clicks that are coming to their site to cancel their bookings. And instead of doing that, they are putting a little bit more effort to invest in, for example, the FAQ area, the support section or content that was there, was informational, and sometimes was not given the weight that it deserves. But now with all of the queries or the searches about cancelling, rebooking, changing dates, reputational type of queries regarding their brand plus cancellation support, etc., they want to rank for those in order to fulfil those needs, to address the questions of the users and be able to hopefully regain the user, keep the user, providing alternatives. So that is what, for example, in my case, I have been working with clients that I have in the travel sector to identify those queries coming in Google Trends that are not Not found in the typical keyword tools databases, but need to be identified by using Google Trends to see what are the actual queries that are starting to be asked right now regarding their service.

The rising ones.

Indeed, the rising ones. So in general, not only the branded ones. For example, when are cruises start working again? When are we expecting this industry to come back to normal? When I can travel back to this location? Gianluca, what are you doing and what you have seen good and bad?

My situation is a little bit different because it's not such a big client. We're smaller. All the cost That's a good point. This client totally quit all the PPC spend. They reduced the number of— they have some people internally, so internal developers, internal writers, but they tried to reduce people like me who are external consultants, asking me to directly go home or don't But it's understandable. I mean, what I've seen for them, that they were quite smart to react very soon. So offering every kind of facility to the clients, this first wave of clients that they wanted to cancel. They especially used the Facebook channel for this, really using a lot of their own page on Facebook in order to to answer all these kinds of questions. And what we did was substantially recollecting all these questions and creating a specific FAQ page for answering all these questions in order to be totally transparent and be able to offer the client to receive this answer. And we did it also with really presenting this page from the homepage. A banner where we were putting a wonderful image of a Sardinia beach, there was now—

Yeah.

This banner of for every question, click here. Also, we have a tone of voice which is more empathetic with the clients, not just selling. So doing so, we are starting to see an increase, obviously not year over year, but an increase week over week.

That is interesting because what I have seen, like the good practices you were referring before, like terrible reactions of companies like disabling their websites completely, right? Even Google had to publish a few days ago their best practices when closing your website to conversions to clients temporarily without actually hurting your rankings in the long term because we were seeing cases of websites completely shutting down, 404, things like that, right? No.

Yeah.

Don't do that. We know how to handle this by whether disabling the shopping cart, explaining the situation, giving an option to the user to register, to be alerted when the service comes back to normal. Indeed, as you mentioned, Gianluca, to do synergy in this case to be able to give good customer support.

I have another thing to say. On the commercial side, the uncertainty is what is eating the brain of the people. They don't— obviously they cannot do last minute, they cannot do last second, they cannot go out of their home. But they cannot even eventually think, okay, when are we— can we— will be able to travel again? So what we are pushing, and especially is all this kind of offer which is Reserve now for September with all the guarantees, filling reservation in the long period in order to have hopefully this reservation transform in real bookings, then eventually driving leads and conversion to these long-term reservations. Because it is the only, really only commercial things that can eventually give some fresh money in this case in terms of commission from the leads for the clients.

Indeed, for the future, that targets these more informational queries that are arising, identifying them on time to tackle them in a good way. Like when I can start consuming again this product. And even if right now you don't have an answer to that, you explain what is the current situation, what are the concerns, and again, you tell the user to please register so you can be alerted when we are back to normal. And also I think that is a really good opportunity to show the vision and the mission and how the brand and the company and the organization is committed with the community. I think that these times are the ones that show the actual character not only of people but organizations.

Yeah, I think it's the case there's a lot of people who put their head in the sand and then when things return in 3 to 6 months, they're gonna struggle because I think as if you're shutting the world down, you're not responding to any questions, I should social media. These people, you know, you've built a relationship and a brand with them. Now you've kind of locked them out. I know Facebook said traffic to their apps is up 70%. So thinking outside of SEO, what can you do on social media? So while you may not be able to, you know, travel to these particular spots in Italy, you know, why don't you do a daily broadcast? You know, what's happening? You know, do cooking recipes. You know, start creating content. which is very specific to your region or your town and your brand. So I think it's a fact that you probably need to look at doubling down on social because that's where a lot of people are spending their time. I think SEO is important and I said it's the basics. I'm still running SEO audits in all my markets because I want them to fix their stuff and again because I work with 50 markets around the world, what's happening in Europe is different to what's happening in America, what's happening in Asia. or what's happening in South America. So, I think you very much need to make sure there's business as usual. Stop the bells and whistles. You maybe don't need that progressive web app for now. You maybe need to make sure the website's stable and loads quickly on mobile devices. But I think in Italy, they're actually starting to see a spike in desktop traffic as more people are working from home and have stopped using their mobile and are actually using their desktop now. So, I think it's very much about going to where your consumers are Making sure you have some type of social content strategy. If you're doing any automated emails, please just stop them. I got an email from a real estate agent last night saying it's a great time to buy a house. Dude, not cool. You need to look at some of your automation that you're sending out to your customers and make sure it's done tactfully. If you're doing any paid media, rein it back. Focus purely on stuff which is driving revenue for business. While it might be great to buy traffic for the ultimate packing guide or 10 walking trips in Italy, if you don't actually make money on that particular task, stop all that activity. So focus on the basics, fix the site issues, make it fast on mobile, have some activation on social, and don't buy coronavirus keywords. Please just don't unless you're a government body. Or, you know, as Gianluca says, you know, you're in the telecommunications space, saying, you know, if you need more bandwidth. But be very, very tactful about this. And yeah, just dial everything back. Have some compassion because, you know, if you have markets like in Italy where currently it's almost 12% mortality rate.

Yeah.

You know, a lot of those people may have lost several family members by the end of this crisis. You know, so dial all this stuff down. Show some empathy.

Empathy, I think, is the important word in this case.

If you're working with suppliers and you have the cash flow now, please pay them. Don't drag things out for 90 to 120 days if you can. Work with your internal teams. If you have the finances, pay your suppliers because you might be the difference between keeping the business open or not. If you have projects planned, And you have the budget still available, push ahead with those projects because again, there's going to be people which are going to depend on this for their livelihood. But you know, it can be the situation you can negotiate with some of your suppliers.

I think what I'm learning from this crisis is that if you are an SEO consultant, it's fundamental for you to diversify your client portfolio. Because in the last years we started seeing SEO specializing in a specific niche: automotive, travel, finance, and so on. Let's imagine our colleagues, SEO freelancers or consultants, that were specialized only on travel. Well, now they are screwed. So I was lucky enough to build a diverse portfolio of clients. So I can allow myself to have a couple of them, the travel ones, for instance, put on hold in order to maintain the relationship and hoping to start, to restart a paid relationship, hopefully in the next future.

Yeah.

But thanks to this diversified portfolio, I can have this, for instance, B2B essential industry companies that are still working, they still need me.

So to finish a little bit today's Crawling Monday, I want you to ask or to leave with like a final message regarding the current situation, the scenario, what we can expect, you think, to see in the future, and one last message to help us to come up stronger as SEOs, whether in-house or consultants?

And yeah, so I would think about only the positive sides of it because there are things which are, for example, traffic is going down continuously, demand is completely crashed. So these are things that you cannot control. So think about the things which you can control, which is utilizing this time. So think about learning from different sources. There are a lot of sources which are available now and offering their courses for free. So just sign up and then start learning. And then on strategic side, for example, if you see the pattern, China has started domestic travel again in some states there. And then that's happening. So Gianluca also mentioned about traffic going up week over week in Italy as well. So this shows that local trend is starting to pick again. And then gradually, maybe in future, after 3-4 months, you'll see a lot of people traveling again, but domestic, most of them. So domestic travel. So think about this. If you're in travel, maybe you can strategize around these learnings and then focus more on your domestic routes, for example, for Omeo, and maybe not put that much focus on international routes for now because the market is moving there. And then in— so I'm based in Berlin, Germany, and here summer is the peak period for us for travel. So we are just a couple of months away from that. So if we expect domestic travel only this summer, then why not focus on that and pause our international routes for now? So that would be my suggestion for travel experts here or people who are in travel and doing SEO right now. But in general for everyone, I would say use this time for learning to learn. So there are a lot of things that you can learn. So that should be your number one priority. And there are a lot of projects that you might have in your list, which you always wanted to work on, but you never had time for that. I think now's the time. So for example, we were also working on content generation using different tools, but now we have started working using a very open, like core and open source solution. So people from my team who never coded in their life, they're also coding. So they're learning that. So of course I'm giving them time so that they can learn and then practice this more and then, you know, learn something. They can be proud of this moment that, you know, during this crisis time they learned something which is helping them throughout their lives.

Focus on learning, self-improvement, and cut the fancy things that don't make a business impact.

The company that will have success and even a bigger success after the crisis will be the brands that are able now to show empathy, transparency, authenticity, closeness to the clients.

So besides all of those great suggestions and recommendations, I will say that if somehow you are struggling also to be able to work from home, I know that is not the usual for many of you, you can check out a few recommendations and tips that I have shared myself and also other people in Remoters. That is a website that, little disclosure, I also co-founded. It was Igor who yesterday published a post on how to handle 3 kids when working from home, right? That's a lot and he's able to do that, right? Also, I have set up a Discord group that is for the work-from-home SEOs and marketers, the Remoters Water Cooler, where we are all sharing tips, jobs also that we see. So you can go and Join for free, of course. So there is this very fun Zoom call going on every day, the Corona Arms, that you can join at 6:00 PM GMT, where many of us go enter and chat for a bit while having a beer together over Zoom. So I think it's great also seeing the more human side of us and the community coming together to support each other in different ways. Also, there is this Google Sheets that was shared by My King, where you can include yourself if you are looking for a job, whether as an employee or as a consultant. Many SEOs have also included themselves there who have lost their jobs. So thank you very much for all of your—

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you very much for your time. And until the next time in Coding Mondays. Bye-bye. Hopefully in a better situation also already.

Yes, for sure.