The coronavirus pandemic has definitely made SEO lead generation and other B2B lead generation strategies more difficult. With people stuck in their homes and industries getting hit left and right, how can we continue marketing our brands as we did before? Well, we definitely have to change our tactics and adapt to the demands of these changing times if we want to make sure that our businesses will survive the pandemic.

These are the SEO lead generation problems and solutions that your business might need in these trying times.

1. Your message is not being heard

Account-based marketing is raking in wins this pandemic season, because the message has to be clearer and more specific now to make an impact. Pitches and offers have to be on point and as specific as possible. Both marketing and sales have to combine their insights to make clearer messages and to create winning strategies that will make this season a winning one, instead of indulging the current conditions and continue a losing streak.

The old technique was mass marketing, but this doesn’t work as much anymore: micromarketing and custom-creating messages is where it’s at. Businesses now have to create the right messages for sections of their lists or audiences that are most likely to make a purchase. Account-based marketing can produce 75% more successful sales than regular mass marketing on digital platforms.

2. Your website is not responsive and is not attracting leads

Admittedly, those with a strong online presence in any part of the year will succeed over those who have not been paying attention to the best practices in marketing. Your website is important because it serves as the 24/7 online storefront of your business, so it has to be responsive and designed well. The goal is of course higher sales, and a higher presence in your niche. Some guidelines that you may want to follow this season are:

• The most important guideline that we can give you is to keep it simple. Simple doesn’t mean that a website lacks feature. What we mean by simple is you can find everything you need on the website with just a glance.

It’s important that your clients find it easy to comprehend what your website has to offer, and it is accessible to the most number of people. However, it also has to encourage people to make a purchase. Take a look at your website and ask yourself: how can your website attract more sales? How can your branding efforts convince your niche that you can provide solutions to their problems?

• The next stop is your content. Content is just as important as UX and UI. While Google places importance on how your website is structured and the quality of the user experience when people visit your website, the content remains king. You have to deliver a content structure that is well thought out and use for your target audience. Your target audience has to find the content that you are publishing useful to their needs because if the information is shortsighted, too short, and unhelpful, they are not going to come back. Now is the perfect time to supply the kind of information that people need because people are stuck at home and they are looking for ways to make their businesses more visible through SEO. SEO lead generation doesn’t need to be complicated, but it has to be practical as well – practical in the sense that you need to provide people their information needs.
• The third important point is your website has to be mobile-friendly. According to Google guidelines, mobile-readiness should be the number one thing on the minds of digital marketers because Google is prioritizing the mobile version of websites more than the desktop versions. What this means is if your website does not resize and the structure of your website makes it difficult for people to find what they need, people are going to be unhappy with your website. Especially in a niche like a search engine optimization where there is so much competition, finding leads is going to be tough if you are going to be part of the throng of other websites with thin content, bad design, etc. You have to stand out properly and because of the right reasons.
• Navigational ease is also important because people are going to access your information with their mobile phones, and it is important that they are able to do so without getting confused as to how they can get around. We also recommend that you integrate your website with social media platforms and make sure that your website visitors are able to visit the right platforms from your main website.
• Social media is the lifeblood of online branding nowadays, it is imperative that you know how to leverage the different strengths of each platform. First, you need to determine where your audiences are hanging out – which social media platforms should you focus on? Then you need to develop a content plan for each of the platforms that you choose for your business. Just like what we do for our main website that is linked to our blog, each of the social media platforms requires maintenance, content, and upkeep. In short, it is vital for people to be able to connect with your brand on the platforms that they love, so you become part of their daily routine too. This can be challenging for some brands that have never really paid any attention to how they are communicating with their customers. Prior to Web 2.0, businesses had this idea that what they can put online is all their customers are going to get. The tables have turned now: it is now customer behavior that rules the internet, and if your website is not providing the right kind of experiences to your customers, your website is going to be demoted and people will flock to other websites that provide what they need.
• Chatbots – they’re driven by AI of different degrees, and they’re handling businesses like a pro. The main reason why chatbots have become so pervasive in digital business culture is they fill a gap that humans can’t – they can be there 24/7, and they can deliver information; ask for information, and record information automatically with the use of cues.

We have been teaching machines to understand our language for decades now, and it’s important that we continue delving into the intricacies of teaching machines how to communicate and understand the nuances of human language, no matter how hard it might be.

AI now plays a crucial role in bridging brands and consumers, and chatbots technology has been advancing for at least two decades now, thanks to innovations such as Siri and Google Assistant. Google has been tirelessly collecting language data and using this to perfect voice-assisted technologies. The logic is the same when you set up a chatbot on your website to answer questions, fields queries, and the like.

The biggest advantage of having a chatbot is they keep consumers engaged even if there is no one on the other end of the line. Unless your business has a call center connection and there is someone manning the website chat twenty-four hours a day, chances are, there won’t be anyone answering customer queries after 5 PM. Chatbots erase this problem by being there for your business 24/7.

Another interesting gap that chatbots fill is they provide engagement in such a way that they are able to present information that is already available on the website in a meaningful fashion to customers. Look at it this way: you can have the entire manual of your services on your website, but people may still avoid it just because they don’t feel like looking at long lines of text.

The solution? Have chatbots refine the answers to people by ‘listening’ to customer queries one by one. Of course, you would still have to fix the system so the chatbot will return the right kind of information and refer customers to the right pages.

But you can just imagine how efficient it would be for your website to have chatbots that would provide information consistently to people without you having to man the process. So in the end, you will be manning the system of the chatbot instead of the individual conversations it will be having with customers and potential leads.

3. You are struggling with what kind of content to produce

The adage that content is king has been around for decades. But what does it truly mean? As we have discussed earlier, it has a lot to do with the experience that you provide your customers when they visit your website. During this pandemic, the most important website visitors are your repeat visitors and customers. Cater to them instead of trying to attract new customers.

This has to be done to ensure that you are taking care of the people who are most likely to make a purchase. Digital-first businesses like SEO companies should also make an effort to assure people that delivery of digital goods and services will not be affected by the pandemic. Part of the branding effort is consistently delivering digital content that is effective, accurate, and most importantly, needed by your customers.

What kinds of content are useful during the time of COVID-19? Here are some ideas to ignite your content generation efforts:

1. Guides

Guides are awesome because people always need instruction to do better in whatever they are attempting with their websites. With your hands-on SEO experience, you should be able to provide the right kind of information to your customers. Guides can be packaged in many ways, but the most lightweight and easiest to deliver are eBook guides as they’re easy to download and can be accessed with mobile phones easily, too. Since people are mostly surfing with their mobile phones, they will be able to access this type of content easily through any of their devices and consume the latter with little effort because PDF files are universally read in all devices.

2. Instructions

The success of websites like WikiHow and similar websites just show that people are always on the lookout for the simplest solutions. Step-by-step solutions in featured posts and content are powerful because they allow people to work not heir problems easily, and they have a visual guide complete with details.

We would also like to point out that when you create step by step content, you are fulfilling the requirement of Google for content on the Web – that all content has to be useful, it has to be in-depth, and it must not be scraped from other websites. You can do research, that is fine, but you have to add your two cents into the content. Your knowledge of SEO should come in handy, as you wouldn’t have to create content that is not related to your niche anyway.

3. Webinars

Webinars are the ultimate type of content for establishing authority in any domain or niche. It is also one of the best ways to encourage people to enter the funnel and receive further emails about an offer that you would like to make. Webinars are useful for people because they can take advantage of the knowledge of experts easily, and they can get it for free. Of course, there are paid webinars, but that is up to you if you want to go that route. Free content has always been the stepping stone for bigger purchases, so never tire of providing useful and free content to your customers.

4. Newsletters

Newsletters keep your list abreast of what is happening to your business and the industry. Now that COVID-19 has several hampered in many industries, people are more in tune with updates from different industries that matter to them. SEO and digital marketing services are not except, so do encourage your customers to sign up for your newsletter so you can deliver information to them more rapidly and in the most direct way possible – through their emails.