How Real-time SEO Grows Revenues

Authored by Aditya Saxena, Vice President – APAC, iQuanti.

Traditional SEO is all about reacting to the Demand trend. On the other hand, real-time SEO is all about predicting search demand and more importantly being ready.

For example, let us time-travel back to December ’19. The world was still of the opinion that Covid19 was China’s problem – even though there were glaring trends that indicated a problem much beyond that. In the ideal world, the Real-time SEO guru would be able to identify some of these trends and act by creating content around themes that would gain relevance a few months down the line.

The consumer mindset is shifting fast, and SEOs are struggling to adjust to the demand trends. Search volumes are not the driver for the content which the smartphone fingertips seek. In times when memes are the currency that feeds into and dictates the shift in perceptions, tapping on to the chatter is crucial not just to look cool on your social media feeds, but for SEO too.

Aligning demand with real-time SEO

Think of approaching events. Be it regional, political or merely weather changes. Depending on what your niche is.

Real-time SEO is like market-speculation. You hedge your bets on the prospective chance of a spike, create helpful content around it, and wait for the clicks to land.

Imagine owning a bakery, predicting people to search for ‘Christmas cake’ around December should be a no-brainer. Or, trying to capture the demand for a new-launched iPhone or resale value of an older version at the same time.

Tweaking your title to reflect the changing nature of your product or feature, or even publishing a guest post on a popular blog announcing it, can help you garner traffic.

Predicting user-queries

Traditionally, SEO is about delivering the most appropriate web-pages for user queries. But, how do you predict user-queries itself?

Keeping an eye on the trends: Tools like Trends.Google.com, exploding topics, and even trending topics on platforms like Twitter, Reddit are an excellent place to start.

Regularly skimming through Google Search Console for long-tail queries even when they have negligible search volume.
Turn on your mentions: Reputation management tools like mention.com, Google alerts, social mention, who’s talking, etc. are a good starting point to keep track of online chatter. Keywords relevant for your business can be added and tracked for new content ideas.

Leveraging the power of real-time SEO

Search Engines like Google are pushing users into the buyer journey much in the same way as retargeting. What Google now refers to as, ‘Search Journeys’, looks at context and relevancy of an entire session. On searching for, ‘pizza shops near me’ and on bouncing off from the domino’s website, you end up seeing options for ‘pizza hut’ as well.

Tapping onto insights like these can help feed decisions about your entire real-time SEO strategy.

Events affecting Search Patterns

Offline campaigns and rise in the impression or even search volumes for branded queries is a correlation that we are all familiar with. For example, almost 76% of credit card searches are branded. This is a direct correlation of heavy spend of banks in brand campaigns.

Covid-19 is a very relevant example of how search patterns have shifted. Travel is down while video conferencing is up. For a broader query like ‘Travel’, the rising queries are all related to the lockdown.

How do businesses make the most of the changing demand?

Aligning your business strategy is key to address the change in consumer behaviour.

Continuing our Covid-19 example, players like Zomato and Swiggy, pivoted their business models to become grocery delivery partners. With people expected to remain in the confines of their home, the demand was bound to rise. And they captured this demand. Similarly, Imagine the possibilities when the lockdown across the country is over, and businesses start opening. Are businesses prepared for a post-COVID customer?

But all said and done, how does SEO help you here? Here are two broad areas to focus on:

Personalization: While most marketers agree that real-time personalization is critical to stay ahead, the struggle to justify ROIs before investment hinders that. According to Adobe, 60% of marketers struggle to weave in personalization in their content.

Understanding Impulse buying intent: While SEO does cater to a variety of intent type keywords spread across the purchase journey, it is quite common to see impulsive searches leading to purchase. Right at that moment. It is disruptive, and for certain businesses can be a game-changer. This unplanned nature of queries has numerous triggers. Emotions over rational intent is a key driver for impulse buying.

For SEO to continue making a meaningful impact and catering to varied tastes in a meaningful way, aligning with how users behave is essential. If the SEO strategy is aligned with being of help to user intent, driving revenue growth will fall in line.