A lot of people will say that during the COVID-19 pandemic the usage of the internet went up to the skies since everyone was stuck in their home and consuming online content. With that many assumed that search traffic exploded also, which is not really the case because the use of the internet does not refer exclusively to online searching but also a wide array of activities like video streaming, virtual meetings, gaming or social media.

But that also doesn’t mean that online searches didn’t go up in this period, especially in categories of health, news and other relevant industries. That as a result had the drop of searches to other things like nonessential business websites and small businesses from both paid and organic search results.

This means that SEO looks very different depending on the industry, since if you have a for this period very relevant and essential business, then SEO was very important for you to push you up over the other competitors in the selective fields. On the other hand if you were running a nonessential business you would feel a huge drop in the visits and thus the SEO then didn’t matter anyway. And all that situation made a lot of small businesses close their doors.

On the positive note, even though the COVID-19 is still trending, it will not do so forever in the search terms. Evergreen questions your customers have will remain relevant long after the pandemic is over.

There is one thing about SEO that people usually don’t think of. SEO is not just about getting traffic to your site, it is about getting qualified traffic. That means that visitors who are getting to your website are looking for what you have to offer in the forest of trending topics and all your hard done SEO over a long period of time made your content stand out with authority on a certain topic. Search engines don’t offer your content for visitors just because you have it, they give it because they think you have something good to offer.

During this pandemic period and economic crisis on the rise, SEO is super important for small businesses. This is mostly because the people want to support small businesses during economic crises as they usually get punched hardest. All the big corporations can usually survive by scaling down and the small business version of scaling down is usually closing down. Thus it creates a sense in the community that if everyone is in financial problems, people will rather give their money for a product or service they need to a local small business and help them out, than giving money to a big corporation who usually fires people to scale down.

And this is where the SEO for small business pays off more than usual because it gives them a competitive edge.