SEO in the Age of COVID-19. Marketers are scrambling to adjust their SEO strategies to account for the COVID-19 pandemic.

That’s why it’s important to explore its impact on search interest trends and organic performance in retail.

As more users stay home and avoid public places, we understand that there is a shift in online behavior.

We have examined these initial behavioral shifts in the age of COVID-19 to better understand the retail landscape.

Our initial findings show that there are two categories of retail sites experiencing opposite organic impacts:

• Retail sites that carry essential goods have experienced positive organic traffic growth.
• Retail sites that carry non-essential items have experienced organic traffic declines.

Additionally, essential retail sites are seeing accelerated growth in clicks two weeks after the initial data collection, while the rate at which non-essential retail sites are losing traffic is slowing.

Methodology

We chose to examine retail clients because their bottom line is being directly and instantly impacted by the lack of consumers visiting their brick-and-mortar stores.

We examined:

• 53 Merkle retail client properties.
• Broke each retailer into either essential and non-essential for a pandemic
  • Examples of essential retailers: grocers, drugstores, general big-box merchandisers.
  • Examples of non-essential retailers: apparel, home goods, specialty big-box merchandisers.
• Looked at year-over year, first week-over-week, and second week-over-week dates.
  • Year-over-year dates: 3/9/20 – 3/15/20 compared to 3/9/19 – 3/15/19.
  • First week-over-week dates: 3/9/20 – 3/15/20 compared to 3/2/20 – 3/8/20.
  • Second week-over-week dates: 3/16/20 – 3/22/20 compared to 3/9/20 – 3/15/20.

Note: The Essential vs. Non-Essential Retailers’ Performance uses first week-over-week data.

Results

The Novel Coronavirus (a.k.a., COVID-19) has had a mixed impact on organic performance across retail clients.

There were two primary retail categories that arose as having opposite performance impacts:

• Essential retail (e.g., grocery stores)
• Non-essential retail (e.g., clothing stores)

Non-essential retail sites are seeing negative week-over-week (W/W) and year-over-year (Y/Y) organic click changes, while essential retail sites are seeing positive changes, as seen in the chart below:

Read more: searchenginejournal