Semalt: How SEO Helps To Keep Clients During The World Crisis


Table of Contents

  1. Introduction 
  2. Keep your Clients by selling them Altruism
  3. Update your products and services to suit the current situation
  4. Increase your likelihood to catch attention
  5. Be Available for support
  6. Build relationships with your customers
  7. Conclusion

Introduction


More than once, the world has almost come to its ending. There was the 2008 recession. Then the global coronavirus pandemic in 2019 / 2020. Now, the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian war that affected the world's trading system, investment plans, food, and fuel network has increased the count. 

But despite these global crises, businesses and search marketing agencies have survived. Only that, their survival did not guarantee that their customers were retained. Most businesses and industries have had to restructure their SEO and marketing strategies to gain a new customer base after the hit. 

This should not be the case - at least not for you as a SEO company. If you want to remain relevant and thrive in your field, the goal should not be just to survive but also to advance. 

That means it is not in your best interest to waste resources on customer attraction and retention over and over again. What you should be focusing on is how to diversify those resources into other areas of your business. 

Today, this guide will dish out 5 tips on how you can keep your customers as an SEO company / business. These 5 points can help you master the art of customer management in such a way that a crisis would never affect your growth again. 

1. Keep your clients by selling them altruism.

It is almost impossible to get customers to pay for a product during a crisis. Their minds are set on the hit, its impact, and how they are affected.

So trying to sell your SEO package at this point might make you lose your clients. This is the opposite of what you want. What you should do instead is to draw them close on the basis of care and charity. 

Altruism is an unselfish choice to devote yourself to another person's welfare - in this case, the welfare of your customers. What is their welfare? What are your customers more concerned about during a crisis?

Many small business owners and start up agencies struggle to stay afloat during a crisis. With a diverted focus, they often lose control of their operations and fall apart. Some others don't meet sales as they should and hence die out. 

So how can you help? 

Choose to help your customers stay alive through the crisis by offering them solutions for free. That way, you show them that you care about their growth and success. In the same manner, you'll build your brand's reputation and relevance. It is a win-win in the end. 

The two most effective ways to offer solutions is to educate and inform. 

Educate your clients on the common challenges they can face with their SEO and show them how to deal with it. You can also inform them of the best SEO technique that they can adapt to ensure their relevance in the online community even with a crisis. 

You can deliver the solution as a blog post, an article, a social media message, or even directly to their email (if you have an email list). By working with your customers to improve their rank during the crisis, you will be surprised how much they'll stick by you even after the zero hour.

2. Update your products and services to suit the current situation. 

 
Normal SEO involves providing services and products to rank for high traffic and conversion rates. There are tons of SEO services and products for this goal. Some of them include keyword research, link building, website audit, content writing, video production, and so much more. 

Whichever among these stood as your main sales funnel, it might have to change with the crisis hit. Instead of selling products and services that will get your customers to rank for sales (which is the main focus of SEO), help them optimize their websites so that they can engage with their viewers through the crisis. 

This is one good reason you need to make the update. Recall that it is almost impossible to get customers to pay for things during a crisis. The same applies to your client's customers as well. If you are focused on pushing the sales message, odds are, you will lose their trust in your expertise. 

What you need to preach is a message that will bring results. Since there will be new keywords attached to newly popular queries, you can incorporate these into your updated packages. 

Below are some ideas for your new product and services.

3. Increase your likelihood to catch attention

Though the goal is to retain customers during crises. You can also do a few things to gain some more customers along the way. By trying to catch attention, you should know that it does not involve selling any package or proposing a solution. It is 100% based on brand building.

There are three ways you can boost customer attraction to your site:

4. Be Available for support

Customers are more likely to stick with a brand through perilous times if they believe that the brand is socially responsible, consistent, but most of all, available. 

You can win the hearts of your customers by being charitable in your approach, switching up your sales point, and improving your brand. But until you are available when they need you, it will all look like a figurehead. 

Invest in an active customer service support. Train the team to respond as you'd want them to and let your clients know that you will be there to attend to their requests when they need you. 

Another option aside from a customer service team is to construct your website to include the help of Artificial intelligence. With a live chatbot, you would be able to attend to your clients' queries in real-time. 

This is even more effective for situations when you might be unavailable. The goal is to show your customers that you are present to attend to their needs and put them through any difficulties they might have while using your products

5. Build relationships with your customers


 
With all that has been said, you need to build a good relationship with your customers. As cliche as that may sound, customer relationships are one of the building blocks of any successful business. 

When you have a good working relationship with your clients, they will become more connected to your brand, tend to trust you more, and are more likely to buy from you again. 

These are also the kinds of customers that can help you generate quality backlinks for your content, hence improving your website ranking in the long run. 

So if you wish to attract and retain your customers during this perilous time, work on customer relationships. Connect and engage them on personal platforms like your social media or through their emails. Make use of personalized messaging to convey information to them. 

Make communication a part of your operations especially when asking for feedback. Outperform your client's expectations with every product and service you deliver. 

Also, show appreciation for their patronage by rewarding them with discounts and other packages that foster a repeat purchase.

Conclusion

If you remain dormant, you are bound to lose customers during world crises. If you also refuse to engage with the global situation, odds are you will become invisible after the contingency is over.

But when you set up a strategy, work on carrying your customers along while also building your brand, you will stay on top of search rankings for a long time. 

So gear up, engage with your customers so that when the economy bounces back to normal, you will not be found wanting in the shadows.