Marketers are struggling to improve their SEO strategies to survive in the COVID-19 pandemic.

That’s why it’s essential to explore its impact on search industry trends and organic performance across retail businesses.

As people are residing home and avoiding public places, we comprehend that there is a change in online behavior.

We have reviewed these primary behavioral shifts in the age of COVID-19 to better analyze the business landscape.

Our primary judgments show that there are two categories of business sites undergoing contrast organic impacts:

• Retail sites that offer necessary goods have encountered positive organic traffic growth.
• Retail sites that offer non-essential items have encountered organic traffic drops.

Additionally, essential retail sites are witnessing accelerated growth in clicks two weeks after the primary data collection, while the rate at which non-essential retail stores are facing slow traffic.

Methodology

We prefer to explore retail clients because their bottom line is being directly and spontaneously impacted by the scarcity of consumers hitting their brick-and-mortar stores.

We measured:

• 53 Merkle retail client assets.
• Broke each retailer into both essential and non-essential for a pandemic
• Instances of primary retailers: drugstores, grocers, general big-box merchandisers.
• Instances of non-essential retailers: home goods, apparel, specialty big-box merchandisers.

Results

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

Two primary retail categories arose as possessing opposed performance impacts:

• Essential retail (e.g., confectionary stores)
• Non-essential retail (e.g., apparel stores)

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

Moreover, essential and non-essential retailers are undergoing opposite rates of change W/W, as discussed in the charts below.

• Essential retailers are obtaining organic traffic at an expedited rate each week.
• Non-essential retailers are facing a drop in organic traffic at a slower rate.

Analysis

Why are we witnessing these changes in search performance across essential and non-essential retail sites?

There are several reasons – including changes in user search way.

For instance, the absence of travel during this year’s season break has affected pre-travel searches and merchandise buying like springtime attire.

Moreover, the increasing concern of the coronavirus has possibly disrupted users’ common search patterns and redirected their study away from more conventional retail searches to more convenient searches that reveal their concerns.

This overall transformation in search interest has contributed to the decline in the organic performance of non-essential retail sites.

Also, users are trending confidently toward essential searches over non-essential searches as they whirl their search interests to adapt to the necessary COVID-19 lifestyle changes.

Conclusion

If you’re also planning to uplift your business in the pandemic, get in touch with Pepagora Internet and experience great results.