Marketing During a Pandemnic: Stop Pushing and Start Pulling with SEO

Customer empathy is at the forefront of the best marketing and tone deaf promotions as if things were normal during the COVID-19 pandemic are probably some of the worst. When it comes to understanding the customer state of mind right now, I think Dean Shaw from SAS summed it up well on Twitter:

Pro Tip to Companies on what your customers are thinking about right now: - their health - their family’s health - their job - their savings - paying their bills - how to transition to working from home - their toilet paper supply . . . . . . . . . . . . . - your product pitch

— deanshaw (@deanshaw) March 21, 2020

And while we know many of these personal concerns are top of mind, we also know that in many ways, the work continues. So how can marketers meet the information needs of customers in an environment where push advertising and marketing seems so out of place? The customer empathy model I've always used to keep content and context relevant is Discover, Engage, Action. Where are buyers finding their information? What formats create the best experience and which triggers inspire action? Answer these questions and you'll be on the road to providing the kind of authentic content that customers want, where they want it and in a way that drives satisfaction for all. Right now one channel for information discovery that is firing hot are search engines. Instead of being tone deaf or completely opportunistic about marketing, companies can double down on their SEO efforts to become the best answer for customers at the very moment they need a solution. Whether you do fresh technical SEO, or content SEO or link audits - companies would do well to make sure that it's as easy and relevant as possible for customers to pull themselves to brand content through search. SEO helps customers solve information problems on their terms, instead of alienating people with opportunism or status quo marketing.

SEO helps customers surface information on their terms, instead of alienating people with opportunism or tone deaf marketing.

To point marketers in the right direction for SEO, here is a new infographic featuring 10 SEO best practices from some of the top SEO minds in the industry including:

• Barry Schwartz - President of Rusty Brick, Executive Editor at Search Engine Roundtable, News Editor at Search Engine Land
• Jono Alderson - Digital Marketing Strategist and Special Ops at Yoast
• Aleyda Solis - SEO Consultant and Founder at Orainti
• Jesse McDonald - Global SEO Strategist at IBM
• Britney Muller - Senior SEO Scientist at Moz
• Ayat Shukairy - Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Invest
• Dixon Jones - CEO at inLinks.net
• Hamlet Batista - CEO at RankSense
• Tiffany Allen - Associate Director of Search and Analytics at TopRank Marketing

You can download a full size PDF of the SEO trends 2020 infographic here. As you consider how to be more empathetic about what's really on your customers' minds right now, hopefully these SEO trends will give you some direction in terms of how to optimize content to attract, engage and inspire action with more of a pull approach than push.

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