In Q4 we analyzed at five elements digital well over 2,000 keywords in the banking area and subsequently measured based on a sample basket of keywords the visibility of banks for these respective products and banking services. To make things comparable, all searches related to a certain brand were removed. Thus, only searches for products and services without expressing a preference for a certain brand / provider were included in the research. However, these keywords are the most valuable as they represent an opportunity to present an offer to a yet undecided possible new customer. The final sample we checked contained 89 SEO words in 8 categories of banking products and the numbers of keywords per group was weighted according to the relative interest of Romanian searchers against each category.

Overall, the most searched for services are credits related: may this be in the form of cards, credits for personal use or mortgages.

28 banking institutions present on the market in Romania and their websites were audited for their rankings. 22 of these sites had relevant results and were included in the final top. Some banks created specialized, stand-alone websites for individual products (such as for their credit cards). These microsites were not included in the audit, and are thus, not part of the results. Only the main banking websites were included in the analysis. This means, that some brands actually could have had higher visibility scores and a somewhat better ranking. Still, this is not the case for the top 5 and for most banks present in the top 10, so we stuck with the initial methodology.

For the general ranking we used a metric named visibility percentage as defined by Advanced Web Ranking (1), (2).  In short, the higher the visibility percentage, the more keywords rank on higher positions. A score of 100 would mean that all keywords rank on position 1. As different banks can be close to one another in search engine results visibility percentages can also be very close. This is especially true for the top 3 and top 5 candidates in our rankings:

The Top 3 is a close race between Banca Transilvania, Raiffeisen and ING.ro, with BancaTransilvania.ro being the leader. CEC Bank, BCR and BRD dominate the Top 5 having very close scores, while Unicredit, OTP bank, Alphabank, Librabank are frequently present in the Top 10.

However, in each category slight differences can and do occur. As the graphic for »Carduri« shows Only the Top 2 is stable and dominated by BancaTransilvania and Raiffeisen, while BRD and CEC bank rank before ING which follows on place 5. Thus, each category, each keyword presents an opportunity in and by itself. Likewise, Intesa Sanpaolo Bank enters the Top 10 in this category. Credit Europe has a good standing, however, their ranking is underestimated as they have a very performing microsite in this category (card Avantaj) which was not included in the monitoring.

The »Credit« category resembles mostly the general ranking; however, Patria Bank and Garanti Bank enter the top 10 here.

Keywords around the expression »Credit imobiliar« favored again Banca Transilvania, Raiffeisen and ING, however with ING being this time on number 2 in the category ranking. Garanti Bank enters the top 10.

»Current Account« related keywords and »Saving Account« related keywords were the last distinctive categories. All other categories are subcategories of the already treaded services. BCR enters the top 3 while also Telekom Banking and First Bank enter the Top 10.

For »Cont Economii« we have again a picture resembling fairly the general ranking. However, Alpha Bank and First bank are also present in the Top 10.

The rankings were monitored at the End of Q4, between November and December and may have changed since then. Overall, rankings can be subject to frequent changes, but constant well doers are likely to have a constant visibility, even if individual keywords may fluctuate on a daily basis.

The platform ranks the best agencies around the world, where users can search for professional and trustworthy companies.

“We are happy to be included into this selection within the marketing industry. We are small, but our clients are not and we believe in making a difference in a fast moving industry. We put our skills and innovative marketing ideas into actionable strategies to help big and medium companies grow“, said Steffen Heringhaus, CEO at five elements digital.

five elements digital is a Romanian based performance marketing agency with 14 specialists serving mainly corporate and enterprise SEO clients in Romania the UK, US and DACH region. According to estimations, over 50% of Romanian users surf and shop every month on websites optimized by five elements digital. 

Our proprietary methodology combines the best of technology and people to deliver business impacting results. Our foundations are all about search: Organic Search, Paid Search and the right mix between them.

The Most Frequent Reasons for Site Migrations and Relaunchs

In practice, we have found the following reasons to be the most frequent for website migrations or relaunchs:

1. Changed design and UX-needs – probably the most frequent reason: site owners want a fresh look and or new sections
2. They outgrew the old platform: thanks to growth, experience and increased activity the old platform comes to its limits. They need better SEO, better order management, multiple languages, want to add content marketing  or a better integration to an ERP, more marketing control
3. Also common: the site remains, but hosting changes to an upgraded version or more performant provider 
4. Not so frequent, but an important change: changing the domain name. 

While site-owners expect from a relaunch a performance, traffic and sales increase many of them learn the hard way that a migration can also pose several traps and dangers. More often than not they find especially that traffic after relaunch decreases – and so does sales. 

In most cases this affects websites which already had a decent or high-level of organic traffic. Indeed, it is the organic, free traffic from Google which is the most sensitive to changes – in both the good and the wrong direction. Complete site migrations from one platform to another are the operations most prone to traffic loss and nearly always need professional SEO intervention to avoid severe traffic loss. This is followed by redesigns (change of theme or skin) which often are unproblematisch, but also can severely damage technical SEO factors if not done right. For example adoption of an infinite scroll which hides content behind AJAX. Unfortunately most website owners do not know which changes are non-destructive from an SEO point of view and which so, so seeking expert advice is recommended. Changes to hosting are usually neutral from an SEO point of view, but exceptions exist:  over-zealous firewalls can sometimes block Google or a wrongly set webserver can work finely for users but communicate the wrong redirect or status codes to Google. So having an SEO professional do a pre- and post migration check is the best thing to do. 

Last but not least: changing a domain name, even if everything else remains exact the same  is always a very far reaching change which usually affects a website as much as platform migration. So again, help from an experienced SEO Professional or agency is the best advice in such a situation. 

Top Mistakes When Relaunching Your Website

• Changing the URL structure without an experienced SEO and a professional redirect plan 
• Deleting content – sounds like a nobrainer, but this is something we see very often and from a business perspective also for valid reasons: discontinued product lines, user generated content such as comments and or reviews, which are to be replaced with something verified, expired offers, changes in the team or services, valid reasons are many. And solutions, luckily exist. But: content is one of the core pillars upholding SEO traffic. Like in a complex house of cards, moving something in one part can have large effects also in other parts
• Infinite scroll or “load more” buttons without  proper SEO setup: the basic versions of these popular features are not readily accessible to Google and burry the largest part of the content far away from the crawlers
• Very related: JavaScript based navigations: while Google os in principle able to render JavaScript it still underperforms against classic HTML based hyperlinks
• Relying on sitemaps for discovery instead of a well-thought information architecture (IA). IA is not about discovery only, but also about the transfer of Pagerank (ranking power) between pages. Sitemaps do not play such a role
• Hiding important text in images – an oldie, but in 2020 still happening 
• Implementing important images over CSS instead of using the classic img HTML element. Only the latter comes with important SEO features
• Using the Heading tags H1 to H6 as design elements instead of a way to structure the page content in a hierarchical manner 
• Having different content on mobile and desktop site – many websites like to show a light version with less content elements on mobile and a fulla big mistake in 2020, the year of mobile first indexing. 
• Having different meta tags and structured data on desktop, mobile and AMP. They are mot visible to the eye of a typical users, but search engines rely on it
• Not using structured data or using it, but with default values 
• Overloading information architecture with too many links in the navigation
• The opposition happens also: damaging the IA by removing important pages from the navigation
• Forgetting to update the robots.txt or robots meta tag settings after moving the development version to the live environment 
• Blocking crawlers using anti-bot services 

Relaunch and Site-Migration Checklist

1. Identify top landing pages (or page types) for organic traffic. Make sure you understand why they bring so much traffic (keyword, content, links) 
2. Know your top keywords and rankings and their landing pages 
3. Exclude search engines from the development version with robots.txt file and robots meta tags 
4. Make sure all old landing pages have a proper correspondent on the new version 
5. Make sure their content matches (or is enhanced). Make sure meta tags are the same as before. Also do not forget image alt tags
6. Make sure all redirects (if URL changes happen) work from all old pages to all new pages 
7. Make sure all links and content are available in plain HTML, without CSS and JS activated 
8. Make sure all Heading tags are used correctly
9. Make sure no content is hidden over JacaScript 
10. Check that there is no content hidden in images 
11. Verify that all images have alt text and preferably also a caption. Thumbnails should have the title of the linked page as alt text
12. Make sure pagination is SEO friendly
13. Optimize for page speed 
14. Make sure all elements present in structured data are available on the page 
15. Check if downloadable files (PDF, office, etc) are migrated, especially if they are driving traffic (can be checked in the landing page report in Google Search Console)
16. Verify that the webserver reports the right status codes: 200 for working pages, 301 for redirects, 404 or 410 for deleted pages, 503 for server errors. Avoid redirecting all 404 pages. 
17. Make sure you use as few redirects as possible, in particular to avoid redirect chains 
18. Make sure the canonical tag is not only present but pointing to the right page including the right subdomain and protocol 
19. Make sure google analytics and/or tag manager are on all pages
20. Set robots.txt and robots meta tags right on new version, when going live 
21. Verify your indexing and ranking 

This list is not completely exhaustive, but should be the base routine covering most cases. 

What To Expect After Migration or Relaunch – SEO Effects

If we just change hosting and did not had problems before usually we should not feel a difference – except higher performance. After a redesign without touching the URL structure we should not see any or a positive effect. If there is a downswing this means that something went wrong – content was changed, forgotten, or made inaccessible. For slight content changes, even enhancements it can take a while for Google to re-assess the page. During this time some ups and downs (also known as “Google Dance” in English) are typical, but should be sorted out within the first 3-5 weeks. 

Migrations or changes of domains have usually stronger repercussions: even if everything was done right, it is not uncommon to experience a temporary traffic decrease of roughly 30% within the first 3 months until the website settles again. For very large websites this can take also a little longer. That is usually also true for domain migrations. Depending on the size of the website this can be a little faster or longer, but two to three months are the typical time frame until everything is resettled.

Obviously, the outcome depends pretty much on the individual case: if before the SEO was jot very strong or even weak, a migration can yield here immediate relief and good results from the very start. Unfortunately this means for websites which are on the peak of success:    Touching things makes breaking things very likely. Changes should be carefully considered and always should keep the SEO department, pro or agency in the loop. 

Usually, Romanians used to plan their holidays for the current year well ahead starting in Q1 and then constantly searching for fitting offers until Q3. The first spike thus is in January 2020 was no different here, and the second in June and the subsequent months. This season, however, was on a five-year low, even after lockdown and restrictions were eased.

For 2020 we can observe first in early Q2 an abrupt decline in searches for holidays, which was obviously forced by lockdown, both domestic and largely international. But even after the lockdown was eased the overall search activity for 2020 (blue line) compared to last year (red line) remained well below. It is hard to capture the entire impact on he industry as a whole by these graphics alone, but it is safe to say that at search activity over the course of the year so far have been down with at least 30% – 40% for the year so far.

This can be seen particularly well if we observe the search for the most popular travel destinations for Romanians like Turkey, Greece, and Bulgaria over the last three years: being otherwise pretty constant, we see a sharp drop during lockdown 2020, between March and June. Beginning with the end of lockdown and start of the holiday season searches rise again, but without reaching the level of the previous year. It seems that this is not necessarily driven by external factors, such as restrictions, but possibly a large number of Romanians prefer to stay safe to avoid holidays altogether.

This is also suggested by the evolution of the searches for vacations in Romania, which on the one hand experience a more characteristic, longer-lasting spike in 2020 (we see three spikes in 2020 »mountain« vs only two in the previous years), however, the overall level of search activity seems to be below the previous year level. 

The same behavior remains visible if we analyze the search data for the most popular holiday destinations at the Romanian seaside: Searches for sea resorts such as Mamaia, Eforie, Mangalia, and Costinesti are heavily affected during the lockdown and at the end of April / beginning of May when they should have their first spike. Starting with the summer holiday period we see a catch-up, even though, the level remains here also below previous years.

The same pattern persists for searches for in-country travel destinations such as the mountain resort „Poiana Brasov” but also Vatra Dornei, Baile Felix, or Herculane: a forced and sharp decline during the lockdown, and a cautious, not fully recovered resume starting with the summer holiday season.

But not everything was the same. The situation gave rise to completely new searches such as here the rapidly rising search for travel conditions.

Not everything was persistent though: The search for COVID tests for travels to Greece appeared suddenly in summer and disappeared the same fast at the end of the holiday season:

But travel was affected in general, not only vacation. This becomes clear if we take a look at the searches for flight tickets, which also include business travel and other migration movements. Thus, the impact on the sector as a whole may be bigger and exceeds the effect suggested by the search for vacations.

The budget, by the way, does not seem the main concern. Searches for last-minute and all-inclusive fell in the same manner, without showing a clear difference in their decline.

What Features Should Marketers Pay Attention to When Choosing An eCommerce Platform?

Scalability and fit for your business model. Let me share a story to illustrate these points. Well over 12 years ago, at the dawn of eCommerce in Romania some quite experienced entrepreneurs started five projects in parallel to validate their ideas and to get some market response. So, they opened two eCommerce stores with different products, a dating site, a technology supply site and a social network. Most people in their place would have worried what would happen if things did not work out. But to some degree all their ventures had some success and started to grow. This is where the question turned the other way round: how far can I get with my platform if it has success? Let’s spin the story further to illustrate this point clearly: What happened was that from the first four platforms three had to be re-built from scratch to support further growth – two of them even before the validation was complete. The social network looked like the early Facebook and was neat and nice, but started to get extremely slow once people started really using it simultaneously… It was built quickly, but not lasting. It had to be rebuilt already three months after the launch, before validation was completed. The dating site used an extraordinarily complex algorithm to match partners according to their compatibility, which was completely new in Romania and stirred quite some interest. However, even long before reaching the first 100,000 members calculating these compatibility scores became a technological adventure… the database type used was not the optimal one for such an atypical amount of data, among many other misses. For any other dating site it would have been good though. So, it was rebuilt within the first six months. The first online shop was doing quite fine, it used Magento, an open source eCommerce platform, with many features built in, a living community, so many plugins and themes were available, and it was just easy to get started. The shop did not sell anything out of the ordinary, eyewear and sunglasses, so implementation and customization was straight forward. And because Magento had a plugin for nearly everything it was easy to add new features. The second shop however, also used Magento. Because Magento has functionalities for nearly everything you find in eCommerce it was easy to start the shop and relatively cheap for its scope (still some 30k EUR or so). However, this time it was different: this shop, was a closed shopping club and having flash sales which daily or at least weekly changed. This required a lot of customization and the sheer volume of operations per week may have exceeded the activity of a typical online merchant per season. Also, the shop grew fast and became really popular. It expanded even to over 10 other countries. So Magento’s big plus in the beginning (having so much already built in) now became a big minus: the platform was overly heavy and slowed everything down with functionalities nobody needed for this shop, while other, really unique but important functions this site needed were missing and had to be added by rewriting or amending large parts of the platform. But they had to stay with Magento for many years nevertheless – after all, you cannot just change the entire infrastructure you are sitting on if you have a crazy growth phase. So, what they did was hiring more and more developers and buying more and more servers. Back then, however, it was very hard to find good developers who could work with Magento and the ones available were extremely expensive and well above typical market rates… Eventually, some years later, the platform was changed, with something very custom, especially built for this type of shopping club and their specific workflows, starting with buying, inventory management, content production, the marketing and sales cycle and finally fulfillment and retour. Re-making this lasted maybe two years and costed accordingly: it needed entire extra teams, so current operations were not endangered. It is a crazy exercise to calculate how much money and time could have been saved if a custom platform for this project would have been used from the start… or to think of the lost SEO opportunities in the first years… As for the fith technology platform: it was also mainly eCommerce functionality which was needed, and Magento did a great job here.

In short: a platform which is good for one business, may not be the right fit for the next. This is why our advice for anybody starting to build a digital business is to do the unpopular work of being really clear about the final goal, but also workflows, support, marketing needs and anything else specific to your business. Write it down, document it and then check each platform if they are a good fit for these needs, or if they turn out to be more like a quick fix solution. If you plan to take a local business such as a bakery or small niche business like a winery or some jewelry online – chances are good that an existing platform will be the right fit. It may not be 100% but 90% good and the remaining 10% can be easily customized for a reasonable price – if you make sure in the beginning that there are enough developers available to work with this platform in your budget. But if things are getting larger or have special features, it really pays off to take the extra time. Make sure you also have an answer for questions like these:

Where should this business be in 2 or 3, in 5 years and from 10 years from now? Is it a popular niche store? Local, national or even international? How many employees will work there and what are their roles? What exactly do they have to do on the website? Frontend? Backend? How many items are to be showcased on the website? How often do they change? What are their special, unique characteristics (e.g. a book store will want to have a “look inside” function, a fashion website needs size charts and pharmaceuticals have to have the prospect at the ready, while making sure it is always up to date). Do you need to integrate an ERP and/or any other external systems? How will fulfillment look like? A marketplace does not need to bother so much on inventory and fulfillment, but it may be wise to solve these problems for their customers: the merchants paying the »rent«. Also, creating customizable and SEO-friendly landing pages for marketing and traffic acquisition becomes a big focus here. Marketing and marketing needs are anyways very important: We see time and time again that operators of classified websites or marketplaces have unpleasant surprises when they realize that the platform they have chosen was actually not built for this kind of functionalities, assembled using a bunch of plugins and now have the decision to face to either completely rebuilt the platform (or write at least an own plugin) and lose time and money when they actually want to speed up, or to just lose the game by giving up on SEO or search engine marketing…

How Does An eCommerce Platform or CMS Influence SEO Success?

Again, allow me a short answer and then a long explanation to it. In short, the platform is the foundation of your business online, and from an SEO point of view maybe even something like the roots of a tree. Most of the time not visible, but essential for life.

So, to continue from our first question and to spin the implications further: In SEO we have around 200 factors which influence the ranking of a page in Google – to use a commonly reported number. But we can boil this conveniently down into three large areas

1. Technical: Accessibility and Indexing and Optimization functionalities – so the ability of a search engine to find your website, all relevant parts and offers on it, and to present the content in a favorable and easy understandable way
2. Content: This does not mean only written texts, but especially in eCommerce also your offering. If you offer what people search for – great! Now we just have to describe it in a way searchers can find it
3. Authority: 20 years ago Google revolutionized the search engine world by disrupting the way how it sorted results. Before putting a relevant result on page 1 it also started to make sure that this result is a trusted, well respected website which answers the search for most users. This may not be all the time perfect, but worked so well, that Google drove nearly all other search engines out of business

So, the technical part is here the foundation, and a necessary condition for Google to find its way along. Most eCommerce platforms get many parts here right today, it is rare that a platform in 2020 has overwhelming or fundamental technical flaws. Optimization potential, however, have most implementations. Paramount to check are not only the typical factors such as mobile friendliness, meta tags or customizable and SEO-friendly URL (to name just a few) but if you can build all special pages you will need (for every brand, product type, Q&A’s, for specific searches typical for your niche… Here we start to blend in with content, which is the second necessary condition: content, often is built in years, expensive to produce and constitutes the offer Google should be sending their searchers to: so if you sell telephones you will not want to have only the product pages for each individual phone, but also category pages for all brands, phone families and even each series within those. Or if you are a classified job board, you will not want to have the specific jobs only, but also specific landing pages for every type of job in every possible location, for every employer and so on. The ability to create these specific landing pages in a search engine friendly way can save literally millions in marketing spent if planned from the very beginning. It makes a huge difference for the growth prospects of any venture to plan these right from the start and ask for these features in an SEO-friendly manner.

Still, truth being told, SEO is a long-term game, so most newcomers in the very first year will not have spectacular results – exceptions exist, but in most cases the competition is already immense and strong. This is because with the platform and the content we got only two necessary conditions covered, we still miss the third and sufficient one: Authority. A new site needs to acquire authority first (sometimes estimated to make 70% of the ranking result), which takes time if you are not already a big brand with preexisting website, which just happens to start selling online now. In either case, just because authority is so hard to built up and content so expensive to produce – you really want to make sure that platform is an optimal fit for your content and uses the existing authority well. Most merchants and websites – if they have some traction and content – naturally built authority over the years. What we see very often happen is that at some point they decide for a redesign, or a complete migration to another platform and then literally lose a large part of their authority and with it – traffic – in some days or weeks because of the relaunch, and ultimately very simple, technical reasons. This is completely avoidable, and the reason why we stress the importance of selecting the right platform from the beginning. If a relaunch/migration is necessary, it is best to get an SEO team experienced with such migrations on board, before the new platform is chosen and before the migration happens.

So, this is to say, the eCommerce platform, is the foundation or even the “roots” of any online business, and not just another technical detail. All SEO, but also other online marketing efforts such as Advertising, PPC, Analytics and conversion rate optimization rests on it.

Concretely, What are the Most Important SEO Factors for a New Website in 2020 and the Next Two Years?

So, let’s get a bit practical now after illustrating the importance of selecting the right fit. From a technical point of view this is straight forward and universal:

• SEO friendly URL
• Sitemaps xml
• Control over all meta tags on every individual page if necessary:
  • Title
  • Description
  • Robots
  • Canonical
• Structured data support
• HTML5 and coherent usage of headings
• Control over image alt tags and data
• Mobile friendliness, if there exists an App – making the app searchable and integrate App and website
• PageSpeed – as an SEO factor often overestimated, but for onsite conversion crucial

Mobile friendliness is maybe the most important point here. Depending on the niche the vast majority of traffic is mobile nowadays, but many business owners still start to plan and design their website with Desktop in mind. The truth is that most users never will see the desktop version.

From a content point of view this is again very specific to each business. Most of the times some informational content is helpful, but on the other hand not every local service provider or craftsman can be a thought leader on the internet. Still, clear and detailed descriptions of all products and services provided are important.

For marketing and tracking purposes we want an integration with a tag manager tool, an analytics solution, often additional tracking tools such as for UX and something for A/B testing. Sometimes platforms come packed with functionalities like integrated newsletter, own analytics solution and so on. This often seems convenient at the beginning, but in the long run we have seen specialized services who focus on doing one thing extremely well doing better than what we may call »swiss-army-knife-solutions« of the internet .

What are Some of these SEO Best Practices that are a Must? For Example: How to Optimize Pictures, their Descriptions, and Content on Your Site?

When it comes to SEO it was and remains paramount to be very explicit about your offer. Traditional brand marketing tries to sell a benefit and communicate with slogans like “Taste the feeling” in order to create demand. But the job of SEO and Search-Engine-Advertising is to capture already existing demand, so you got to speak at least partly the language of the searchers: so, if you sell soft drinks – you name them, if you sell laptops – you tell them, instead of writing in big letters on your website “Best prices in town” and then hope that the pictures around will make it clear to what products this slogan actually applies. This works on the homepage, but not on Google, where people see only small preview texts. This does not mean that you should not do the branding, but that you need to do both. Describe your offering, services or products, categorize them, describe every category and every product, include as many details as possible and add additional materials such as images, video, brochures. Images should have also a description each, so a Search Engine understands its relevance for the page / offering better. Images have a huge potential for optimization. The content of the site should be well categorized, in most cases a silo-form is the most appropriate form of information architecture. A page for every product or service. This is really important, but sometimes new site-owners see this as redundant. They start with the idea, that people enter the website on the homepage, read what is there and then navigate to the relevant offer.  While this can happen, it ignores all the people searching for a product using a search engine and from there, entering directly on the best fitting page. But this also means, you need to have such a page in the first place. Because if done well, over time most visits start to come organically from search directly to the offer and not over the homepage.  

What is the Share Between Desktop and Mobile in 2020 and Where to Focus Your Attention and Investment?

Some general statistics for Romania show up to 54% of mobile traffic (tablets included) vs. 46% of desktop traffic. But what we see with our clients is more like something around 80% of mobile traffic for most sites. For news this may even exceed 80%, most eCommerce is between 70% and 80%. B2B may be lower, here we have seen for example 60% and for some very specialized industrial niches, we have seen even as low as 30-40% mobile usage. But this is the absolute exception. It is important to notice though, that for many sites conversion rates over desktop are still higher. So mobile is an important channel for discovery, in our experience, it converts very well with users who have an app installed, but desktop remains an important channel for conversion. 

What are Typical SEO and Performance Marketing Budgets for Average eCommerce Retailers and Other Online Ventures, When Starting Out and Ongoing?

Meaningful budgets to start out vary heavily with many variables, such as niche, competition. After all, a marketing plan and budgeting is an entire discipline by itself. Having said this, in Romania, the least amount we see frequently allocated for a new, medium-sized eCommerce venture is between 5,000 – 7,500 EUR per month, split among the most prominent channels like PPC advertising and remarketing, ads on social media, mostly Facebook, SEO and maybe also affiliate. Classic media buying plays often a minor role for budgets this size.

For bigger ventures, we often see budgets around 10,000 EUR/month among the same channels. However, if a newcomer wants to go against the really big guys, they should be aware that some of them spend easily 100,000 EUR per month on performance marketing alone and that they may even have a separate budget for classic brand marketing. Romania had an incredible growth in this sector in the last 6 years.

Sometimes amazing things can be done with small budgets. But after monitoring the market for over 12 years in Romania, I have the general impression that most companies with small budgets to start with don’t get far because they never get the critical mass or momentum for a sustainable growth. But it really depends, we have seen cases where a very profitable B2B business successfully uses performance marketing as a single channel to grow to five figures in monthly revenue (EUR) and still do not exceed 700 EUR in costs per months, agency fees included. We also have seen very successful SEO campaigns with decent budgets up to 1,000 EUR which brought a new site within a year on the top within their niche with over 50k organic visits per month. But these are exceptions, not necessarily the rules. This is why we always start new projects with an audit.

It is Unlikely that an Online Retailer in 2020 will Have a Monopoly in a Certain Niche. There is Already Plenty of Competition Out There. How Can a Retailer be Noticed and Stand Out?

The best thing is to have a good product that people like and which you have somehow exclusively. In fashion this is your brand, the quality of the products and the lifestyle the brand transmits. Same goes for cosmetics, jewelry, gourmet food and drinks. Here it is relatively easy to stand out from a marketing point of view. But for items such as books which can be bought everywhere and are everyway the same (or phones, laptops…) you need to come up with something else: price is important, but also service, delivery and retour. All these are reasons why people buy at amazon. Because they know they get the best products with the best service, as fast as possible and with minimum risk. Such merchants are your real competitors if you sell commodities. So, you need to come with something on top to cope with their operational excellence. This can be either some innovation which alters the product (maybe a special service on top, bundling) or a plus in customer intimacy (customization options, free consultation with the product and so on). Also really specializing in your niche can work well: etsy.com with its handmade product only approach (and its strict enforcement) really managed to take that market share from ebay away and defend it.

What ROI – Return On Investment Can an Online Business Expect From 100 Euro or 1,000 Euro Promotion Budgets? How Should Such A Budget Be Allocated: Social Media, Search Engines or Newsletters?

Typically marketing budgets up to 1000 EUR are best spend on advertising – either on social media ads or search engine advertising – this depends on the service. In general, lifestyle products and services work very well on social media, while many useful commodities, B2B products and services work better with search engine marketing. With this kind of advertising, the feedback is fast, and ideas can be validated: is the audience the right one and a profitable one? Are these keywords well converting or not? Also, if the campaign is profitable, profits can be reinvested, and you get an idea how much this can be scaled. If you decide to start SEO after this initial validation, you can redirect efforts from the beginning in the right direction and minimize waste. With SEO being a long-term game which requires in many cases some months or even a year of pre-financing it becomes even more important to know where you target at. This is why we prefer to work with either well-prepared and equipped startups or with growing companies who already have a working business model. These are usually the best candidates to profit from a sound investment in SEO.The rewards for them tend to be huge: Most consumers still prefer organic results over advertising, which means that the traffic potential for an organic result on the top of page 1 is many times larger than for paid ones. So, it is not uncommon to get five to ten times the traffic from an organic listing as compared to a paid listing, while the ongoing costs for an SEO campaign are usually much lower than for such an CPC campaign. The ROI for SEO thus should be higher as for PPC – five to ten times are not uncommon – but those are generalizations. Best is, to check separately for your individual case.

Our main predictions where as follows:

• We will see a new wave of digitalization, which will affect both work-habits and shopping-habits (and online shopping opportunities)
  • Online collaboration tools (like Zoom, Gmail, Hangouts etc) become more widespread and will be adopted by industries / segments which formerly did not use them
  • More business will shift operations online and stay with it, at least as an option and to diversify risk (e-learning, online events and everything which can be delivered) as a wider audience discovers their advantages
• As more companies try to gain market share online, respectively start shifting operations to online we will see a steady rise in the demand for digital services marketing
• Consumer behavior shifted mostly short-term, especially leisure activities and demand for informational offers, but some newly formed habits could stick (e.g. having groceries delivered at home)

So lets start to revisit these, one by one.

Mobility Behavioral Trends

First of all, lockdown in Romania was lifted after 15^th of May, and many business – but not all could go back to more or less »normal«. So, according to Google’s mobility reports, public transport is still less frequented  (–17%) as it used to be, probably because many business still work from home – at least many of those which have the possibility. This is also reflected in 30% less traffic at workplaces.

However, data suggests that Romanians fed up with lockdown and now compensate for the long time spend home by going out as much possible: So, traffic to residential areas is mostly returning to baseline. Meanwhile, traffic to parcs, groceries and pharmacies is growing, while retail and recreation has returned nearly to the baseline (here we need to consider that not all recreation facilities are re-opened. Thus, a growth towards the baseline means an over proportional growth for the reopened facilities/locations).

So, lets have a look at the different categories of search behavior

I. Curiosities / COVID Specific Searches

We had some curios observations, like the already iconic quest for toilet paper at the dawn of lockdown, which was also reflected in a sharp rise in Google search for toilet paper… This was obviously not there to stay and meanwhile has returned to normal, as consumer’s trust in retail and delivery increased and the end of lockdown. 

So has the search for bread (or how to make it), which pretty much returned to pre-corona levels.

Likewise, the search for »how to cut your hair« disappeared soon after hair studios re-opened.

II. Leisure, Information, Entertainment

Nevertheless, even if people start to go out again and searches for (opened) restaurants return to normal, not everything as it used to be: One the one hand, the search for restaurants largely resumed, at least for the lucky owners, which have outdoor facilities (»terase«)

But the search for holidays though is at a low, unprecedented during the last five years:

The always high demand for games had sharp spike during lockdown, which is usually observed only in winter months, when people must stay at home for seasonal reasons. Now, search for games online has returned to its typically high level.

When it comes to information demand, we see that the demand for news after an unprecedented rise and request for (mostly) hard news has normalized, even though it is still on a slightly higher level than pre-corona.

III. Work-World

The work world was affected in several ways. On the one hand, we had an unprecedented rise in the usage and search for online collaboration tools.  Even if the days of the spike are over, their level remains clearly above the anterior level. Netflix in the picture below shows that business which used the opportunity, could expand market share beyond the mere moment, as new segments of consumers started to form new habits. Gmail and Zoom show how newly discovered online collaboration tools keep to stay in place beyond the moment of strict need.

The search patterns for »locuri de munca« (jobs) shows an atypical and actually sad evolution during and after Corona: During the Corona crisis the searches for jobs reached a low, which is typically observed only during the winter holidays in December. Practically large parts of the job market had been locked. After lockdown, the search for jobs has not only resumed, but has reached extremely high levels, usually only to be seen during the high season from January to February during the year. Anecdotally, the high demand for jobs is not matched by a likewise high demand for work, and some analysts assume an unemployment rate of up to 8% – which is very high for Romanian standards.

IV. Shopping Behavior

Shopping behavior has returned to normal, but with a twist. On the one hand we have seen a rise in the mobility stats to places such as groceries have slightly grown vs the baseline. It seems like Romanian’s compensate for the long time at home  by enjoying shopping outside. Nevertheless, the search for delivery remains on a higher level, than during pre-corona times.

How much higher, is well captured in the graph for »order online« (»comanda online«) for the last five years.

After an extreme spike in spring 2020 the search for online shopping opportunities decrease, but settles despite the end of lockdown on a well above pre-corona level.

V. Online Services and Marketing

As more business is shifting operations online, we expected the demand for online services and marketing to grow. These assumptions largely hold true when it comes to paid advertising: The search for Google Ads (formerly AdWords, here in red as comparison included) is steadily growing and sees a new high after the end of lockdown. This comprises two different movements: 1. Business who had to cut their marketing spent during Corona and business who started online advertising with the rise of corona. Some of the first category resumed their advertising activity after the end of lockdown and thus their activity added up to the activity of new advertisers. However, the advertising market as a whole suffered from Corona huge losses (Dragos Stanca estimates at least 35 mil EUR to be lost), so it is still early for proper predictions or evaluations, because we also have a tremendous negative vector from the finance world.

This is also true for SEO, which enjoyed a spike during Corona and now largely returned to pre-corona levels.

SEO is there for the long term, with results manifesting in the medium-term, at least after some months. So it is mostly a privileged for established and / or well-planned funded business.  A look into the USA though, a market with a large share of professional players shows a clearly increasing trend, for SEO this year, despite or because of the corona Crisis is hard to argue:

Anyways, it reflects rational behavior oriented towards the needs of future digital markets.

Thus, as it turns out, my »Hello World« post will not be about us, but about what is happening to more or less the all of us now – and what you and your business could do – at least when it comes to marketing in the time of coronavirus, quarantine and lockdown.   

What we are seeing now is a massive change in habits – at least temporarily, which is way bigger than the surprisingly and unprecedented trend in toilet paper, but also basic necessities such as bread and a hype for disinfection solutions

People are also changing their news consumption and brand preferences:

If we can believe reports from China, in the first phase the need for hard news multiplies, to decrease then and to give way to infotainment again, as people start to get overfed with serious news about a situation they are experiencing themselves anyways. Still, screen time is on the rise and the demand for content also will be.

So, as it seems at least some things are working, and publishers ought to do well? Not quite. Publishers rely on advertising revenue, and most advertisers in times of closed shops and lower consumer demand do not have anything to advertise. The Romanian publisher Association BRAT already asked the government for help to save the industry, otherwise, serious financial problems, maybe even bankruptcies are foreseeable. The companies who are doing online-only, are better off here because they can compensate lower prices with higher traffic volumes.  

But the lockdown does not affect retailers, or restaurants only, which took an unprecedented hit:

No, people start also replacing other basic services, such as haircuts:

In conclusion: most businesses are affected in some way or another and in the business world spirits have been going down for some time now. Abruptly, the HR market took a dive to an extent, usually to be seen only between Christmas and the New Year. In other words: spirits are really low in the business world.

Many advertisers (not all, some are having a real boom right now!) in this context put their ads and budgets also on hold – for good reasons. But also, other marketing activities are often put on hold.

So, some days ago my partner from overseas asked me if we got already some case studies on how to do marketing in the times of COVID-19, especially for SEO, to sustain a pitch. Coronavirus just started to spread, and they are in the first phase.

Some clients there had put a well-justified stop on their Google Ads campaigns. What else would you do when your offline business is closed? Also, you can switch them back on any time you are ready to resume your business and clients ready to come back visiting you. In their case, I had recommended the stop myself.

As for SEO, the question sounded strange to me. How should SEO work in times of corona? Obviously, from a market share perspective, it works the same as always, maybe even better, because others take a break or have to give up. As for traffic and sales – this depends on how your business is responding to corona anyways. If people stop buying now from AdWords or Facebook, they will not buy from SEO either. But still, there are some important differences between the channels. You can reasonably expect the SEO work you will do now to pay off not only now, but also in 3, 6, 12 months – and anytime the whole pandemia stops. Ads spend now will be of some, but little effect in the future.

So, my recommendation was and is for everybody who does not plan to go out of business for good to continue SEO, in order to grow or at least to keep your current standings. Because, in short, the natural trend for a website in Google Search for a website is the same as for a dead fish in the stream: going down, unless you don’t actively work on progress. For some of our long-term clients, we even assure a basic SEO maintenance program for free or at largely reduced rates (those are these with entirely closed shops now, which otherwise would run in the minus) to prevent that they lose the hard-earned market share and to help to get us all over the moment together.  

Nevertheless, to get back to my partner form overseas, all corporate is the same, they want some data to justify their decisions, and thus needed Coronavirus SEO case studies, so what else to do as to deliver them such?

Coronavirus and COVID-19 Safety Measures and Marketing

Marketing is a support function for sales, and sales obviously depend on many factors, most of them not related to marketing: needs, purchasing power, right now, consumers focus on the strictly necessary because they have less disposable income, are unsure about their future and/or expect prices to go down. Some industries will see a quick recovery, because consumption is only postponed, but not definitely canceled (the visit at the dentist, for example, will most probably be done after lockdown is over, but the revenues from the Easter Holiday season for the HoReCa people is and will remain lost).

Depending on the country you live in this may have started earlier or later. I personally live in two countries (Romania and Russia) and have family in three (Germany), while our business works literally around the globe (Eastern and Western Europe, USA, Australia). So, I evidenced the whole story from several different angles, both on the human level, as well as in business contexts. Most things are in common though and happen/start only at different points in time.

So, if you enjoy browsing data and charts, take a look at Google’s mobility reports, which just today appeared. But, to sum it up from what I have seen so far:

• Most people stay at home or at least limit going out to the strictly necessary minimum (voluntary or not)
• Public life and service is reduced to a minimum
• Whoever can, works from home, however, a large amount of businesses were also forced to temporarily close or reduce the activity
• Whoever can, tries to shift operations from offline to online
  • Work meetings for white-collar workers now happen on Zoom or Google Hangouts
  • First restaurants try to jump on food delivery
  • More retailers try to sell online
  • Some real estate agents were reported to walk prospects virtually through apartments
• Some simply do nothing and just close and/or reduce costs

Now, let’s focus on the businesses which may boom now, even profit from this situation.

Online collaboration tools are obviously trying to use the trend. Also, online entertainment enjoys unusual high demand now. This seems at first like a trivial observation, but if we factor in that the digital workers already regularly were working with these tools, the story of what may happen next is that seemingly a new segment of the population is starting to use these tools. What I expect from that is that more people will start to use online productivity tools on a regular basis, entire new industries start now to embrace or increase online operations and for me, it is pretty sure that some of these newly formed habits will stick.

A good example was the case of Adidas in Germany. Some businesses,  among them Adidas recently announced they will stop paying rent because of Coronavirus and »Adidas spokesman Ranau« mentioned in this context that »its sales online generated only 15% of group earnings, but this form of retailing« would now be accelerated “intensively.” Meanwhile, Adidas paid its rent, but the interesting thing here is, that large corporations now start to realize the importance of online operations. From the consumer side, online shopping is clearly on the rise. Also here we can expect a change of habits – after many experiences for the first time the convenience of getting their groceries delivered home, they will not want to miss that in the future either, at least for non-perishable and heavy items such as detergent, beverage or toilet paper =)

Corporations are known to act slowly, so it may take some time for this strategy to manifest, but on the other hand, after corporations took a decision and adopted a strategy they do it with all their resources and power their machinery has to offer. This is by the way also the thing I like about working with enterprise: all this long waiting and time of preparation is rewarded with results on scale. Long story short, I expect a huge push and acceleration for digitalization.

Education is another sector that now starts to embrace eLearning much more than before: regular schools, including primary schools and universities, try out online teaching (at least here in Moscow). And even small, local event organizers (such as Book shops) started to move their events and seminars online – some of them with unexpected positive feedback. So, for example in the case of a small London niche topic books store, which after putting its events and seminars online received positive reactions from over the world, that finally, these events are accessible to everyone. Initially, these events were obviously meant to keep the offline business afloat and profitable, and to bring people into the store during the time of Amazon. But I would not be surprised if the chance to reach a national if not the global audience will make them continue or offer at least hybrid forms (offline + online).

So, these are the general trends I am observing so far. Now let’s see our own experience:

SEO Case Study: Medical / Private Hospital Chain

After the Coronavirus outbreak and introduction of safety-measures demand dropped by 50%. This is logical because clinics had to close or to treat just urgencies. This chain of premium clinics does so, this is why they still have some demand left. At the same time, we grow rankings and market share as usual. The strategy here is to use the time while others are inactive to expand market share. The majority of customers will not definitely cancel their treatments, but they only postponed them.  Thus, the strategy is to have an even bigger share of the pie when demand resumes. 

SEO Case Study: HoReCa Retailer with Complementary Online Shop

Here we have the online shop of an HoReCa and for professional cooking equipment retailer. HoReCa is obviously locked down as restaurants are closed and many businesses will face difficult times also afterward. YoY demand is well grown (we took on the client in September) and grew it by 300%. In March demand started to decrease – but with growing SEO visibility further, SEO continues to uphold traffic which seemingly grows as also consumers start to resume their buying, even though, they do so at home. So, here the opportunity is to shift the focus to consumer needs to keep sales running. 

SEO Case Study: DIY / eCommerce Online Store

Here is a niche online-only store for some DIY components. Immediately after the crisis started, traffic went deep in the red both year-over-year and month over month. As we start to work on increasing market share we see in recent days traffic, i.e. consumer demand growing back. At the beginning of the crisis, consumers seems to were focused on basic necessities only. Fear and uncertainty about the future may have had a say in this. However, it seems, people are resume their demand slowly during lockdown or maybe start even using the time to improve their homes.

SEO Case Study: Petshop / eCommerce Online Store

We grow this online-only petshop for one year now. Back then it had less than < 300 organic visits per month, now it has over 50k organic visits per month. Demand in February and March is traditionally high because it is the season for de-parasitation, but online demand may be even higher now as probably many visits to the VET also are postponed. Delivery in times of quarantine works. Visibility is growing further.  

Overall, unless you expect to go out of business, there are some ways to use this Crisis:

1. If you see falling demand – probably it is still good to invest now in SEO to gain market share while other businesses stay idle or will fail. If you do nothing your market share will fall over time, especially as there is a new wave of digitalization to be expected, so online real estate and visibility will be harder to earn in the future
2. If you see constant or growing demand, keep working on SEO, maybe now more than ever, because other businesses will move their operations online, too  

These are obviously convenient words, from an SEO agency. However, it is what I see if I try to take a glimpse in the future, buy exploring search trends in Italy, which is currently way ahead in the crisis and where lockdown prevails already longer than in most other parts of the world