How to Leverage Insights in Botify to Adapt During the COVID-19 Outbreak: 12 SEO Questions Answered

The current situation with COVID-19 has undoubtedly affected all of our lives – from adapting our personal routines for the protection of others to overhauling the way we work within our organizations. While our team at Botify is treading new waters ourselves, we’re committed to helping our customers succeed. After all, not only has user behavior changed with rising demand for information and products, but Google’s priorities have changed as well.   

So, we turned to our Search Data Strategists to see what trends they were noticing.

• Perhaps you’re re-evaluating your marketing spend and could benefit from leveraging more SEO insights for long-term revenue that doesn’t turn off due to decreases in budget.

• Maybe traffic is surging for specific content and product pages, and you need to prioritize user-friendliness for those pages on desktop and mobile. 

• Or maybe your critical pages are underperforming, and you can use features like segmentation, structured data, and more to uncover insights to help you prioritize relevant pages.

No matter what situation you’re facing, we’re here to help. Below you’ll find the use cases and functionalities in Botify that we felt would be most helpful to you during this time. 

The questions fall into three buckets:

• How people are using search
• How Google is treating search
• Understanding the impact on your websites

Navigate to the question that interests you through the links below, or scroll down to see them all. 

1. What are some of the new ways people are finding my content in response to COVID-19?
2. How has user behavior changed in response to COVID-19?
3. I’d like to understand which areas of my site visitors are landing on right now.
4. How can I optimize my site in response to  COVID-19?
5. I’d like to understand the impact of keywords during COVID-19 on specific pages I care about the most.
6. I’d like to understand which keywords I should utilize in my content to increase traffic.
7. Where is Google spending its time crawling right now?
8. How are search engines changing their crawl activity as a result of surges in COVID-19 search queries?
9. My website is experiencing a sudden spike of sustained traffic, and I want to make sure that I don’t have any website performance issues.
10. How do I keep track/analyze how much inventory I have left of my best-performing merchandise?
11. I’d like to monitor my website’s content performance based on COVID-19 keyword themes.
12. How can I use Botify to help my Customer Support/Success Teams?

Have a question that hasn’t been answered yet? Let us know in the comments! 

Here’s how Botify can help you adapt to the current changes in organic search: 

How are people using search today?

1. “What are some of the new ways people are finding my content in response to COVID-19?”

Where to look in Botify: RealKeywords → Filter Analysis → “Is New = Yes” 

• Here you can view and analyze all new keywords that you just started getting impressions and traffic for in the specified date range. 

Where to look in Botify: Real Keywords → Winning Data Dimensions 

• Here you’ll find all your keywords that are trending up in terms of impressions and clicks compared to the previous period. Below that report , you can also see “losing data dimensions” to evaluate where demand has shifted to and from in light of the coronavirus.

Understanding your searchers’ intent can help you prioritize the content they need most. Learn more in our Full-Picture Framework for Creating Relevant Search Content.

2. “How has user behavior changed in response to COVID-19?”

Where to look in Botify: RealKeywords → COVID Keyword → Column Selector → Visits (Session Duration, CTR, Bounce Rates, Pages per session)

• While there are many metrics you can use within Botify to understand user behavior, we recommend leveraging insights like session duration, CTR, and bounce rate to understand how long your visitors are staying on your site’s pages, how likely they are to click through to your website, and how many people are leaving a specific page on your site (and how quickly).

3. “I’d like to understand which areas of my site visitors are landing on right now.”

Where to look in Botify: SiteCrawler → Visits → Apply Segment Filter 

• Filter your website using already configured segmentation or simply use breadcrumbs out of the box to view the number of visitors on a specific section of your website.

More advanced? Use:  SiteCrawler → URL Explorer → Apply Segment Filter → Column Selector   

• For a more detailed, specific view of your site’s performance by page, the column selector allows you to understand exactly what traffic is coming from a specific search engine, number of impressions, visits, and other data from GSC.

4. “How can I optimize my site in response to  COVID-19?”

 Where to look in Botify:: RealKeywords → COVID Group → point more of your internal links to pages you’re prioritizing

• Although we don’t recommend doing this often, redistributing the linking to avoid non-”first necessity” products could be valuable, especially for e-commerce websites. 

5. “I’d like to understand the impact of keywords during COVID-19 on specific pages I care about the most.”

Where to look in Botify:: RealKeywords → Keyword Groups → Segmentation 

• Track and analyze the keywords from Google Search Console you care about most with Keyword Groups. Create a keyword group using “exact” and/or “contains” keywords, and use segmentation to choose the specific part of your website you wish to analyze.  

Need to brush up on segmentation? Check out our Top 5 Tips for Using Segmentation in Botify.

6. “I’d like to understand which keywords I should utilize in my content to increase traffic.”

Where to look in Botify:: RealKeywords → Ranking → New Keywords Over Time OR New Rankings Over Time

• Use these graphs to discover new keywords that are driving traffic to your website. We recommend visiting this graph weekly (or daily!) to understand which keywords your customers are using to discover your content. New Rankings Over Time is a great leading indicator for understanding what searchers are looking for (and what you should be writing about), as it combines new combinations of keywords and URLs. 

How is Google treating search now?

7. “Where is Google spending its time crawling right now?”

Where to look in Botify:: LogAnalyzer → Crawls →  Daily Distribution → HTTP Codes

• Google updates and changes its algorithms all the time. In response to COVID-19, it is possible that Google is adjusting the algorithm to better help people find answers to the question they have at this time. To help understand and anticipate a change by Google, use the trend lines to understand what percentage of crawl volume is going where. You can audit this by going to HTTP Codes to take it a step further and see if there are any new error codes.

8. “How are search engines changing their crawl activity as a result of surges in COVID-19 search queries?” 

Where to look in Botify:: RealKeywords → COVID Keyword Group→ Column Selector →  Log metrics (Crawls and Visits from Search Engines)

• Because Botify is a unified data suite, we are able to pull in data from SiteCrawler and LogAnalyzer to help you understand exactly how search engines are crawling your site as it relates to the COVID-19 keywords your pages are ranking for.

How are the recent events impacting my website?

9. “My website is experiencing a sudden spike of sustained traffic, and I want to make sure that I don’t have any website performance issues.”

Where to look in Botify: Log Analyzer →  Visits → HTTP Status Code

• If you see a spike in 4xx or 5xx status codes, it’s a pretty strong indicator that your website can not handle the influx of traffic. You should prioritize cleaning up your status codes to make sure your visitors are having a good on-site experience and can get to the content they need. 

Where to look in Botify: SiteCrawler →  Performance → Segments → Compare to Previous Date

• As Botify crawls your website, you can compare your load time and status code performance compared to a previous time. If load times are increasing compared to a previous period, this may be an indicator that your sustained traffic is impacting performance.  

A great way to gut-check your work, hone in on errors, and see your SEO metrics in real-time is by leveraging the Botify Chrome Extension. 

10. “How do I keep track/analyze how much inventory I have left of my best-performing merchandise?”

 Where to look in Botify:  SiteCrawler → Content → Structured Data 

• If you have structured data on your website, you can use this workflow to identify your out-of-stock products. Learn more about structured data. Note: If you are not currently using structured data, you will have to use an HTML extract. Learn more about HTML extracts here.

11. “I’d like to monitor my website’s content performance based on COVID-19 keyword themes.”

Where to look in Botify: RealKeywords → Keyword Groups

• Publishers can use this workflow to prioritize information about Coronavirus and serve content relating to physical and mental health, homeschooling, resources during this time, and more.

• E-commerce sites can use this workflow to prioritize content relating to home deliveries, products in high demand, and more.

• Customer service industries (e.g. travel and insurance companies) should identify and create new content to keep people informed about relevant updates.

 12. “How can I use Botify to help my Customer Support/Success Teams?”

Where to look in Botify:  RealKeywords → Keywords Explorer → Filter Analysis →  “Keyword Contains ‘?’ ” or ‘What’ ‘Where’, ‘When’, ‘How’, ‘Why’ 

• Regardless of the industry you’re in, people will be searching for information about the impact of COVID-19 relating to your business. Take flying, for example. People are looking for information about what they need to do if you have to take a flight right now, what airlines are doing as precautionary methods, how cancellations and refunds are being handled, and so on. Your customer service teams are likely overwhelmed, so think about how SEO can help address your FAQs in a fast, accessible way for searchers and your site’s visitors. Using this workflow will allow you to understand important intent-based questions your customers are searching for during the COVID-19 crisis. 

Shifting priorities to adapt to change  

We hope these questions can help you navigate and prioritize what’s most important for your site and your visitors right now. If you have a question that has not been addressed, feel free to let us know in the comments, reach out to your Customer Success Manager, or send us a Tweet!