Lahore-Covid-19 affected everyone’s life worldwide. Numerous businesses had to lockdown, some have packed up and others have reduced their ad spend to cut down their expenses and float in these difficult times. By June, ad spend across Europe dropped to as low as 9% (according to the World Economic Forum). That of Germany and the UK also reduced by as much as 12% of the usual ad spend seen in previous years. This is a big hit.

In April, a survey involving 447 UK based brands by Marketing Week and E-Consultancy shed more light on how SEO proved helpful. It reported that 7% of these businesses invested more than before in marketing during the Covid-19 outbreak.
29% maintained their usual course. 50% of the companies cut down on their ad spend. Businesses take one of two main courses – either they seize the opportunity and invest more in times of crisis, or they cut costs.

All online marketers know that SEO plays an important part in branding today. It also helped the businesses that continued investing in their online marketing during the Covid-19 pandemic. SEO is a low-cost channel for online marketing. Although results are usually slow, they are lasting.
According to SI GLOBAL, here are four ways SEO helped businesses during the COVID lockdown:
SEO is a low-cost marketing approach with more ROI
As a low-cost strategy, SEO allows brands to use key channels and maintain an online presence. They can minimize their ad spend and invest less in SEO at times like this to beat their competition.
SEO helps get long-term traffic through organic searches
SEO may not always be the best option for some business modules. Running ads is a short-term fix to get more traffic to your website. You may invest in ads on an ongoing basis if you are sure you prefer this to the long-term benefits of SEO.
SEO leverages the local search factor to boost businesses locally
People rely more on search engines in times of adversary, and SEO makes brands more visible to potential customers. Using the right local keywords in SEO, businesses can become more visible to local potential customers and take advantage of this.

SEO leverages search trends generated during the COVID pandemic
Since covid-19 affected the world, lifestyles have changed. There have been new search trends based on location, lifestyles, available resources, and different parameters. Based on these new emerging search trends online, businesses have had to use SEO to make their brands visible to potential customers.

Overall, applying these strategies above have helped most businesses remain afloat in this time of difficulty. Those that adjusted their budget and maintained SEO are seeing the benefits of this decision now. Others that chose not to invest in SEO have sadly lost their positions on SERPs. This has hit most businesses hard and they must go a long way to overcome this deficit in their ranking.

We are living in a digitally advanced world, where making sure that your brand and business are always visible is the key to success. SEO is no doubt, very important, and helping businesses overcome the crisis.