If you are in hospitality or something similar and have had to offer takeaway options to remain open, chat to us about our fast turnaround websites for e-commerce – make it easier for your customers to buy from you! One thing that hasn’t changed is, people will still want food and drink made for them. Find out how we can help.
Local SEO Updates
Do you already have a Google My Business listing? Fantastic! (If not, we can show you what to do.) Google has made some changes to GMB in response to the Covid-19 pandemic to allow extra keywords such as ‘take away’ to be added to the business title. This is likely temporary, but it’s the first update you should do if you offer delivery, take away or any part of how you deliver your goods has changed.
Make sure your details are up to date. Update your opening hours, phone number and business description to reflect your new policies or operating procedure. This is a great place to add an alternate pick up address, delivery protocol or similar.
Temporarily closed? If you are closing your business or shopfront temporarily, then let GMB know to display this for your customer’s information.
Posts. Did you know you can post information to your listing? Yes, you can post specials, blog links, images, and more as a ‘post’ function to GMB, this is great if you have things to offer daily or fast-moving news.
Have a page about Covid-19 on your site.
We have added a banner on many of our clients’ sites, linking to a page explaining the isolation, cleaning and quarantine activities that they are doing in an effort to stop the unnecessary contact and interaction.
Make sure you include your opening hours, sanitation efforts, store/office capacity, new rules for distance, deliveries or orders. Try to be specific as this will save your office staff explaining and answering questions to confused shoppers and clients.
Check Google Trends for New Keyword Targets
You might have slogged it out with SEO in the past and identified the valuable keywords that are converting, and driving traffic. Unfortunately, this will be skewed now as the intent of the searcher has changed dramatically. Use Google trends and search for your usual keywords, but add in qualifiers such as ‘at home’, ‘delivery’, ‘online’ or similar. If there is an uptick in your industry keywords based on these and other keywords, then it’s time to get some content up there to address this new search behaviour.
To stay with our hospitality example, A 5-star restaurant may have been found easily based on their menu and keywords targeted at ‘date night’, ‘birthday dinner celebration’ and ‘anniversary dinner’ amongst others, but now, targeting ‘anniversary dinner to heat at home’ or ‘date night food delivery’ will be their best friends to target.
Revise your content
If you have some more time on your hands, use it to update the content on your website. Overhaul the titles, meta descriptions, H1 tags, and blog posts while you have a spare hour or two a day. We all neglect our own websites when we are working hard on the business.
If you don’t have a blog, start one – it’s the best and quickest way to inject some new content into the site, including content targeting the new keywords you’ve identified in step 3.
If a blog isn’t your style, rewrite pages that explain your ordering or hiring procedures. This has surely changed and so having some definitive information on the website will be welcome.
Make an offer
Are you able to add value to your current offering? We don’t mean giving away things for free that will hurt your already fragile bottom line, but packaging up what you already offer, with some extras thrown in can be a fantastic goodwill gesture for new clients customers, and it’s a reason to make contact with them as well. Ensure that your business remains front of mind and ready to help when needed.
