COVID-19 has impacted businesses in many ways, including changing website traffic, search rankings, online review, etc. Businesses selling essential goods and services are seeing increased traffic, while smaller businesses selling inessential goods are seeing negative results.
COVID has also had interesting effects on search. One tool that is used to measure the health of the search landscape is called a SERP sensor. The SERP sensors have overall been normal and quiet since COVID, but outside of that there are indications of significant impacts. For example, sites like Google and YELP temporarily removed the ability for users to leave reviews of businesses because of the expectation that businesses might have decreased customer service due to COVID.
The biggest change, however, has been in e-commerce. Businesses selling essential goods (e.g., medical resrarch, home safety) have seen revenues as much as quadruple. Google even changed the search page for COVID so that users could categorize the information they're searching for. This is a shift from how Google has traditionally gathered information, and may lead to a move towards category-style search menus.
Businesses should consider short-term and long-term actions to help adapt them to this unpredictable environment. In the short term, businesses should use Google Search Console to see if their impression rate or keywords have changed. If a business' website is ranking for new keywords, then the business should increase its use of such content. In the long term, businesses need to understand that search engines are no longer word match engines. Search engines are now using artificial intelligence to understand the intent and meaning behind searches. The world's leading search engines (e.g., Google, Microsoft, Yahoo) recently formed a working committee called schema.org to allow for webmasters and developers to use a shared vocabulary when deciding on a schema.
Source: https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/how-covid-19-changed-seo
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