What to do if your website's organic search traffic has DROPPED because of the pandemic

News flash : there’s a global pandemic going on 😷

At this point, we’re several weeks in and the initial shock over COVID-19 has passed… but now we’re faced with this “new normal” situation and everyone’s doing their best to figure out how to make the most of it. We don’t want to just keep our heads above water - nope, we want to THRIVE during the madness!

This pandemic has brought about a total upheaval of day to day life, as well as business. Literally EVERYTHING has changed - we’re all staying at home, many people are working from home for the first time ever, social distancing is mandatory, and we likely haven’t seen our loved ones IRL in a long time.

Politicians are delivering daily updates that often make our heads spin. Breaking news from the WHO is now required reading. Government alerts are popping off. Our phones are blowing up with notifications of Insta Lives. It’s wild.

We’ve also seen a complete disruption of digital behaviour and the craziest thing is that it pretty much happened over night back in mid-March 2020! People are glued to their screens (phones, laptops, TVs, etc.) and we’re spending more time than ever online …. but not always in the ways that you might expect.

This situation means different things for different people, brands and businesses - and yes, that means your website and it’s traffic are going to look different from what you’re used to.

For some industries, this global pandemic has been a blessing and business is better than ever - Amazon, Netflix and Zoom are booming and stacking mad cash right now.

However, many other industries & niches have taken a major hit. A change in consumer habits has a direct impact on website traffic, organic online searches and even businesses’ bottom lines.

This is particularly true for North American or European-based websites, brands & businesses.

You might have unexpectedly found yourself in this unfortunate situation and maybe you’re freaking out that your website traffic has DROPPED and your business is suffering. If you have, that sucks and I’m truly sorry…. but rest assured that it’s not all doom and gloom! I’m here to help you out as best as I can and reassure you that it won’t be this way forever.

In this blog post, we’re going to go over what to do if your website’s traffic has dropped or taken a hit because of COVID-19.

Whether you’re an independent content creator/blogger, a small business or brand, or a bigger company, I want you to take a step back and look at this drop in traffic & business with clear eyes and your head on straight.

After you’ve read this post, I want you to feel like you have a plan and actionable steps that you can follow to improve your situation, and hopefully boost your website traffic and set your business up for future success.

Updating your website during the COVID-19 pandemic

Let’s cut right to the chase: we’re several weeks into the COVID-19 global pandemic and sh*t’s getting real.

These are absolutely wild and crazy times and I often catch myself thinking, what in the actual heck is going on right now?!?!?!?!?

We’ve never experienced anything like this - the whole Corona virus situation and it’s impact on the world is truly unprecedented.

Personally, I feel like I’m stuck on an emotional rollercoaster and I don’t know when it’ll end. Some days are great, I feel high vibe and excited about work…. whereas other days are a struggle because I get so caught up in the hardships and challenges we’re facing collectively.

That being said, now more than ever I want to SHOW UP and YOU in any way that I can! Whether that’s my audience of casual blog readers, my amazing newsletter community or my beloved clients & customers, I am here to help you as best as I can.

My area of expertise is obviously Squarespace web design/development and Squarespace SEO, so that’s what I’m going to go over here today.

My inbox has BLOWN UP over the past few weeks with panicked questions from people who need help with their websites now. Many businesses are moving online (no easy task), and everyone is looking for help updating website content, collecting orders, setting up email newsletters to communicate with clients & customers, ramping up SEO... it’s a lot!

In this blog post, I’m going to share actionable updates you can make TODAY to your website to make sure that you’re totally covered during the COVID-19 pandemic. I will use lots of Squarespace-specific tips/recommendations but even if your website runs on another platform, I know you will still find these instructions helpful!

How to change a Squarespace blog post's publication date - video tutorial

Blogging and creating content for your website is rarely a “publish and never touch it again” situation.

It’s quite common to go back to old blog posts that you published a long time ago and update their content, improve the information, make it more current and increase the value to both search engines and visitors.

This is actually something i’ve been doing on my own website, and even though it takes a lot of time and effort to improve all of these previously published blog posts, I can already see some major SEO benefits! We’re talking an increase in website traffic, higher conversion rates, more opt-ins to my newsletter and higher rankings for my desired keywords and keyphrases. Yassss queen!

Once you decide to go back to these blog posts and pump them up with a second life, you probably want to update the blog post’s publication date while you’re at it since this can be an SEO factor.

I’ve already answered the question “Does changing a blog post’s publication date affect SEO?” so if you haven’t already, be sure to read that post for more information and a better understanding of what’s going on in Google’s mind.

But in this post specifically, I’m going to show you exactly how to change/update a Squarespace blog post’s publication date with clear, easy to follow instructions.

We’re looking at changing the publication date for blog posts that you’ve already published, as well as draft blog posts that are scheduled to go live in the future.

Click play to watch the video tutorial below or read on for written instructions!

Setting up business information on your Squarespace website

Hey there hunnis, happy Thursday! Another glorious summer week is wrapping up, I hope you’re getting excited for the weekend like I am :)

WELCOME BACK to Day 14 (!!!) of the Live Video Training Extravaganza, we’re at it again with another week of free live video trainings and I am so excited to continue sharing this content with you! Week 3, hot dang.

Quick summary: every day for the past 2.5 weeks, I’ve hosted a free live video training over on my Youtube channel and shared those replays here on the blog.

This Live Video Training Extravaganza was supposed to be a 1-week-and-done situation but honestly, it’s been so much fun that I wasn’t ready to stop quite yet… so I decided to continue these live video trainings into this week too. LET THE GOOD TIMES ROLL!

So we’re back at it again and you can watch even more of these daily lessons as I keep creating content for you!

This morning’s video was glorious (duh) and I know you’ll get lots of out the info I shared, whether you’re doing the whole DIY thing on your Squarespace website or if you’ve worked with a web designer/developer and want to make sure that you fully understand all the settings in place on your website.

In today’s video training, we talked about setting up business information for your Squarespace website.

Whether you’re a bricks & mortar business that has a physical location with real hours of operation, or you’re more of an online services based business, or even a blogger, everyone’s gotta have some sort of contact and business information on their website!

But depending on what your needs are and how you serve your online audience, clients and customers, that business information might be displayed differently or more thoroughly.

I’m sharing these business information settings and suggestions with you and fully explaining how they work because many people miss out on this step, or aren’t taking full advantage of all the ways they can improve user experience by including the business information on their website. Common mistake but totally avoidable!

Alright, that’s enough intro for one video… let’s get to the goods.

Click the live video training replay below to watch now!

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Thank you!