Covid-19 (Coronavirus) Keyword Research Tips

The Covid-19 coronavirus has disrupted almost every aspect of our society, with the health and economic crisis “having a far-reaching impact on our way of life.” For millions of people around the world, the pandemic has brought with it a host of new challenges, as well as exacerbating existing ones.

Since most people are quarantined, consumers turn to search engines as a valuable tool to get the information they need to make decisions that affect their daily lives, the health of their families, and the way they interact with businesses. Can I defer my mortgage payment? How long will it take for my Fresh Direct delivery to arrive? When will it be safe to fly again? Now more than ever, it is important that marketers understand and address their audience’s questions. This is why we have created this list of Covid-19 KeywordKeyword
A keyword is what users write into a search engine when they want to find something specific.
Learn more Research Tips to help you identify the topics that are most important to your customers and help them through this difficult time.

Bonus: At the bottom of this blog post, you will find links to thematic keyword lists you can download to help you support your customers during this time.

Think About Your Customer Personas

Before you know how your customers might be affected, you first need to know who your customers are. Personas are the foundation of your marketing strategy. Identifying your target customers in advance allows you to think as they do and gives you the confidence that your strategies will resonate, drive engagement and conversionConversion
Conversions are processes in online marketing that lead to a defined conclusion.
Learn more. Grouping your customers into cohorts can be helpful in identifying common challenges they may be facing and how your products or services solve them. Once you understand these things, you can better imagine the types of keywords that matter most to them, because you understand the purpose and motivation behind their searches. If you are aware of the challenges that affected your customers prior to Covid-19, they could continue to be a problem or even get worse during this period. Whatever these things may be, write them down as keyword considerations for content development.

Listen to Your Customers

Understanding how your customers can be affected by Covid-19 can be a difficult task. Not everyone may be forthcoming with this, and valuable data about their problems may not be immediately visible. Are they being impacted economically, which has led to their inquiry? Are their concerns more focused on the health and safety of their family? Maybe both? One way to obtain this data is to work with your customer support team and have them send you any lists of popular customer questions. These requests can be a good source of data for keyword research.

Another way to get good question data is to collect queries happening in the search bar of your websites. Some customers may face very niche challenges that are not covered in your FAQs or support areas of your website. A remedy can be found by adding more or updating existing content to reflect these new challenges. Some customers may even be looking for a product that you have never sold on your website before. This could be an opportunity to order this product and start selling it.

Use an Enterprise SEO Tool

Conductor has many features that can help you understand keyword trends that are happening right now. Conductor’s Explorer feature shows you topics such as audience size, seasonality, social mentions, social engagement, and more generally, how people talk about the topic you are researching.

Use Google Trends

Google Trends is a free tool from Google that lets you see “what the world is looking for.” For a marketer, this can be a valuable tool to understand the popularity of searches that take place over a certain time frameFrame
Frames can be laid down in HTML code to create clear structures for a website’s content.
Learn more. Aside from being able to see a keywords popularity trending over time, you can also see a comparative view of multiple keywords popularity over time. Google TrendsGoogle Trends
With Google Trends the interest in relevant search terms can be analyzed. This allows search queries to be valued and, over the course of time, such as for the seasonality of search terms, be classified.
Learn more also provides you with some other interesting data points such as interest by region, related topics and related queries which could be useful when collecting keyword data.

Focus on Non-Covid, Non-Coronavirus Terms

Although many users are looking for information that uses Coronavirus or Covid-19 as part of their queries, many more are likely to occur in the “non-branded” space. Searches of this kind can be customer groups that are feeling the economic or health effects of the pandemic. From this point of view, it is important to recognize the value of these searches as they can provide more information about your customers “needs during this time. Keywords like “waiver of credit card fees “or” deferral of payment “indicate that a user is experiencing financial difficulties and needs support.

If you look at keyword groups more broadly, are people looking for specific groups of keywords now than in February or March? Are these queries related to a hardship they could be experiencing or an essential product they need? This is where most of your research should focus, as not all keywords containing COVID-19 or Coronavirus will be used by your audience. Collect these head-level, intent-specific or question-based keywords and develop a content strategy to support your customers.

What We Did: Free Covid-19 Keyword Lists

Using our tools, we analyzed the SERP across a few industries as it relates to coronavirus, and from there we tried to understand the keywords those URLs were ranking for. This then led to further research on various topics. We also delved deeper and looked at the key players in different industries to identify trends affecting their customers. We scoured blogs, forums, new websites, support pages, FAQs, and even looked at The CARES ACT for more insights.

What we developed were industry keyword lists that help you understand what your customers are looking for during the pandemic. Each list contains about 1,000-1,500 keywords that we think are relevant to people affected by Covid-19.

Depending on the company, these keywords can be helpful for creating supportive content. You can download the keyword lists in our Learning Center.

1. Travel
2. Real Estate
3. Health and Wellness
4. Shopping
5. Finance
6. Insurance
7. Entertainment and Events
8. Technology

How to Use These Lists

As more information about Covid-19 is published every day, indexes continue to update with more keyword data. Therefore, it is valuable to start tracking any relevant keywords from the above lists each week, or even track them daily within Conductor. In terms of keyword categories, you can use the base categorization we provide, or you can even create your own categories that best match these terms best map to. The purpose of these lists is to provide you with a baseline of keyword research so that you can start creating content today that will help your customers tomorrow.

These lists are living documents, and we will visit them again as more information is published. Feel free to use or supplement them as you like. Download the keyword lists.