Did COVID 19 affected Your Web Traffic?

If we consider a single family of four people, we will be able to gauge the major changes that have happened. Parents are working from home using the internet and applications, and children are attending classrooms through the web.

Under such a precarious situation, our buying habits have witnessed major changes. We are having a minimum of outside food, traveling as little as possible, and purchasing sanitizers and medicines. The entire population is headed towards a few sectors while abandoning other needs.

Web traffic, just like the economy, is dependent upon basic demand and supply principles. The sectors with higher demand during the pandemic will gain more web traffic than sectors that provide services that can be kept at bay.

It is essential to remember that all websites do not have the same niche. There are various websites that may not be impacted by COVID 19 at all. That is because of their niche or product/services they sell.

Problems

We have seen a major surge in the traffic for websites that sell essential items on the internet. That’s because people are reluctant to step outside their homes. People are more inclined to buy essential food commodities and other household items directly at their doorsteps.

There is a surge in particular products on the web like the purchase of thermal thermometers, normal thermometers, sanitizers, soaps, liquid hand washes, and other household items. There is also a surge in the purchase of essential food items.

With more and more people entering your e-commerce website for specific items, there is a higher chance of slow loading pages. Slow loading pages are the fastest way to lose business because people are likely to leave your website if it takes an eternity to load items on your webpage.

On the other hand, there is a substantial drop in the purchase of items that are not-so-essential like airlines, luggage bags, gym supplements, and gym wear, etc.

Solutions

Make your website reliable, resilient, stable and available for everyone

• SEO services must consider creating separate pages for those items which are higher in demand.
• You need to keep using crawling and indexing of your website and its traffic to monitor results from close quarters.
• Make sure to monitor your log files to detect search engine errors.
• Be very careful about changing your page URLs.
• Reduce the page sizes with high traffic by removing unnecessary videos and photos or gifs.
• Do not forget to optimize the pictures on your website.
• You should consider offloading all the static content to a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
• Some CDNs provide compression services for major parts of your website’s content. Check this information with your CDN service.
• Do not forget to optimize HTTP caching. This will enhance your website’s performance even with a high surge. Efficient, thorough, and strategic caching policies or strategies are the way ahead.
• You can avail of the use of service workers, which will display certain items offline. That means even if the page is taking time to load, there will be certain contents visible like your contact details or names of products, etc.
• DDoS attacks are becoming common for websites with surging web traffic. Try and guard against it by using service providers like Google Cloud, Cloudflare, Azure, etc.

Make your website easily accessible.

• Since accessibility is about team effort, make sure you go through Google guidelines, which address the COVID 19 situation.
• Do not forget to review your accessibility, which will help you determine which strategy is working and otherwise.
• Accessibility guides will help you concentrate on specifics as screen read support or keyboard navigation.
• All common accessibility issues can be monitored by using Lighthouse audit by Google developers.

Remain safe and render secure and private web browsing to customers?

It is absolutely essential to keep your website data safe and ensure secure web browsing, which will not reveal customer identification.

• It is important to use HTTPs for all websites and not just websites that handle sensitive information.
• Website encryption is important for the days to come. Therefore choose a host server that provides HTTPs in default mode.
• Secure your website cookies.

Provide better user experience and user interface to customers

• You should minimize the use of steps required in your website map before someone checks out. That means minimizing physical interactions in your CUJ or critical user journey.
• Provide CTA buttons on pop-up banners right at the website doorstep. This way, you can directly take them to the most commonly availed page of your website. It will ease the website navigation traffic pressure.
• Do the same for your mobile website.
• Keep monitoring user behaviors and adjust CUJs according to needs.
• Easy and responsive web designs are responsible for faster loading pages.
• If you use forms for customer details gathering, then make sure it is easy to use.

Improve the overall website and SEO performance

• Use Lighthouse SEO audits to ensure your website’s visibility in all search engines.
• Check out SEO audit blogs released by various search engines like Baidu, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yandex.
• Start by image compression and avail services, which provides for various other content compressions to reduce the web page load.
• To discover improvement opportunities, you should run Lighthouse or a WebPage Test.
• Try to learn more about how to use cross functioning of your website to optimize speeds.
• You can use native image lazy loading to make sure your website does not load images that are unnecessary for users.
• You should check for personalization scripts that load asynchronously and avoid non-critical functionalities for faster web page loading.
• Learn more about the difference between render-blocking scripts and page load timings so that you can make an informed decision as to which one needs to be prioritized.
• You should probably consider disabling, removing, or optimization of all third party codes, which basically makes up for more than half of all requests.
• Use ChromeDev Tools to find out unused javascript and CSS Codes and remove them. You should also remove unused tags from tag managers and consider removing features that are no longer in use or useful.
• Add your backlinks in existing blog posts or websites by relying on white hat link building services.
• Create and distribute fresh high quality content on other websites also known as guest posting services, to gain backlinks and referral traffic from them.

Conclusion

Some Local SEO Services companies are worse hit by the COVID 19. You can and should work mostly on your reputation management now more than ever. That means to give more importance to customer feedback and solve issues faster. Keep a closer tab on pages which regulate and record customer comments.

There is indeed difficulty running through web traffic management during the ongoing pandemic. You should remember that you need to be crystal clear about your business policies during these critical times.

If you mark yourself “closed temporarily” on your Google My Business, you are more likely to showcase a better image for yourself. If you are starting to deliver items to certain pin codes, make sure that related information must be shown to people as soon as they enter your website. Take care of your website’s health as there is no other substitute for organic searches on Google. Do not take advantage of people’s fears and keep a crystal policy.

If you are also affected due to COVID-19, and your business is running low, connect with the best ecommerce SEO Services, and get a solution to every persistent problem of your business. Our consultation calls are obligation-free, and we can help you to determine the weak points of your business. With an experience of 15+ years, we proudly tag ourselves as the best SEO company in Gurgaon.