More signs of hope.

Things are looking up at the moment, but I think we’re a long way off a return to normality yet. People have settled into home life and bought the necessities, now we’re seeing spikes in other areas. Regardless of where your business stands in these uncertain times, it’s imperative to communicate your message to customers.

What I learned

• We may be on our way back to normal
• Why sales are making a comeback
• People are still searching for big ticket items
• Have you got your message out?
• Hit me up for a free site review

Transcript

Hey, welcome back Rankers. How’s it going? Working from home all right? Isolating okay? Hopefully, we’ll be out of this sooner rather than later. Certainly in Australia, it seems like we’re going pretty well. South Korea, I noticed, has just started to relax some restrictions, and certainly a few countries in Europe are as well. A return to normality?

And what we’re seeing here is a slight return to the norm. We’re not there yet. We’re a long way from that one, long, long way actually as it turns out, as the data would show, but in certain industries, we are seeing things come back, and that’s because we’ve gone through that initial hump of getting the house ready, of getting the family ready, of coping with home schooling, all these other things that families have had to cope with. The home gym. I mean, this is an indicative search, where we’ve seen this huge hump and then we start to see it dwindle off as people get their bread machines, as people get their iPads and everything else.

And what’s been interesting to watch is phrases, like for sales. So this is what it was over 90 days, and we can see there that it’s actually slightly higher now than what it was before this happened. And you can see there we’ve got that corresponding slump as I showed last week, to the corresponding spike in so many other industries. So what happened was we got the house ready for home, we had a spike in all of those things like kettlebells, like home gyms, like desks, like iPads, like jigsaw puzzles, all of those things. And then we saw that subsequent trough in all these other areas. And you can see that took a great big drop in sales.

And we look at this, what people are looking for, for sale. So this was people looking for houses for sale, shares for sale. And you can see right here, iPads for sale. Now this is rising searches. So if we wanted to see the top by volume, this is just what’s trending in the last, in during that period. But houses for sale, puppies for sale, that’s what they’re like, they had property for sale so we’re starting to see a return of confidence to some degree in that property market. I would say certainly not what it was. When we have a look at houses for sale, we can see there we’ve had a really good weekend and when we go back and have a look at the last 30 days, we can see how that compares and you can see that upward trend that we’re getting there now. And then if we go and have a look at the buying signals, specifically the word buy, we can see once again it’s buy house, buy shares, buy, swap, sell. Once again, this is top, not rising.

So that is of volume and if we go and have a look at the past day, we can get an idea of what was that information in those searches yesterday. We can see there still buy weights, still buy Lego, buy webcam, they are the rising searches yesterday. “Too stupid to buy a house,” but, “buy house,” “buy house,” “buy car.” So it’s interesting there are some people still out there looking for things to buy like cars, which we didn’t think people were going to be buying but they are, because there are other things that have been announced out there like the stimulus package from governments, state governments, federal governments, those sorts of things.

So all of these things are happening really, really quickly and from week to week, we’re seeing these changes. So I’d love to know what you’re seeing and if you’re seeing things that are different or if you’ve got some ideas and if you have a site that you’re struggling with, please let us know and we’ll give you the free review as we’re doing with everyone.

Did another one on Friday for a dairy. Page load time, 19 seconds. Really, they didn’t know. A lot of people don’t know those sorts of things. If you’re an eCommerce site, you probably are aware that your site is slow because your customers would have told you. But if you’re only doing a limited amount of eCommerce and it hasn’t been your main focus, you may find there’s a whole bunch of other issues that you could be fixing right now that could really be uplifting your sales. And that’s certainly true for a lot of restaurants who are doing takeaway, get your messaging up on your site if you haven’t, just put a hello bar, put something up on the site, a banner that says, “Hey, this is what we’re doing.” We’re either, “Open for business as usual,” or, “No, we’re not and this is what we’re doing.” Just get that messaging out there. Go and have a look at your keywords. Go and have a look at the trends that are happening in Google Search Console around your keywords.

We’ve had clients switch advertising back on this week because we’ve seen that return to some of the B2B categories that we look after for our clients. So the same could be true with you, but you need to be paying attention and you need to be looking at all the opportunities that are presenting themselves because there are actually quite a few right now.

Hopefully, that’s helpful, and hit me up if you want that free review. See you next week, please like, share, and subscribe. Thanks. Bye.

Jim

Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.