When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the big digital ad companies became extremely conservative and disallowed pay-per-click advertising related to coronavirus topics. The advertisers implemented a knee-jerk reaction to nefarious companies who were trying to profiteer off a public health emergency.
However, many companies with legitimate screening, testing, and personal protection equipment procurement services found themselves temporarily or permanently blocked from digital advertising. One of our clients, Remote Medical International, was one such company.
Remote Medical leapfrogs the competition in promoting COVID-19 services
Remote Medical offers workplace health and safety services to industrial clients around the globe. Located in Seattle, near the location of the first known cases of COVID-19 in the U.S., the company jumped quickly to develop screening, testing, and COVID-19 consulting services for employers in remote and industrial locations looking to operate safely and protect employees.
Our agency was tasked with promoting their services out to the marketplace before their larger competitors jumped in. We simultaneously set up LinkedIn, Google, and Bing paid advertising campaigns, along with a COVID-19 landing page optimized for organic search engine results page rankings.
If we had to rely on paid advertising alone, we would have missed out on two months of leads
Google immediately blocked Remote Medical’s advertising campaigns claiming they violated their coronavirus sensitivity policy. However, they did engage with us to resolve and eventually white list all keywords and ads. But it took 6-8 weeks to get the issues fully worked out and the whitelisting complete.
LinkedIn also worked with us, but we had to compromise on ad copy and omit specific words.
Bing outright rejected all the ads of a company that’s saving lives and protecting workers!
SEO to the rescue
Luckily, Remote Medical had a very strong, search optimized website with a good domain authority. Within a few days of launching the COVID-19 services landing page, Google had crawled the page and ranked it at the top of the search results for “COVID-19 Employee Screening Services” and other related search phrases.
Remote Medical quickly gained the #1 position on Google for “COVID-19 Employee Services”
This quick action resulted in dozens of qualified leads. The sales team was ecstatic!
The investment in SEO is worth it
Securing top search rankings for competitive terms takes time and effort, just like training for a marathon. You have to continually produce quality content, get editorial placements with backlinks, and integrate SEO best practices on your site with respect to site mapping, UX, and cross-linking.
But the effort certainly pays off when you need to rank for a key phrase and advertising is not an available option.
