A lot of us here in the UK and around the rest of the world are now adjusting to the new reality of working remotely from home.
This is so we can all do our small part to flatten the curve of the COVID-19 virus by reducing our contact as much as possible with others.
During this uncertain time, while you can’t be physically present in your brick and mortar store(s) or offices for your customers, it is crucial to stay connected and engaged with your customers by maintaining your digital presence, through your website and social media channels.
Your website and social media channels are the most important ways to emphasise your business or brand, and the most powerful ways for you to communicate your story during this time and key messages with current and potential customers.
With the government is forcing everyone to stay indoors for the foreseeable future, it means more people are going to be online. Thus, making it even more vital to maintain and grow your SEO campaign to make sure your marketing strategy can recover stronger than ever after this pandemic comes to a halt.
We have gathered together some SEO tips that you can do right now at home to maintain and grow your digital strategy, and so you can also stay connected and engaged with your customers online over the months ahead.
Build Your Strategy Around COVID-19
Before we get started on our tips, it’s important to know that you need to build your digital strategy around your response to the COVID-19 pandemic and communicate that message clearly and frequently to your current and potential customers.
With the continually changing landscape, we are now facing; it’s important to keep your customers informed.
You can do this through:
- Your Website – clear and regular updates and blog articles on your website.
- Social Channels – update your Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter with your message, helpful tips and story.
- Email – sending an email to your current clients and/or mailing list that provides value, news and information.
For more tailored advice, relevant to your industry and business, contact The MoreTraphic team for help developing the right strategy for your business.
DIY SEO Tips You Can Use Right Now
Google My Business
There are four things you can do to keep your Google My Business updated and relevant:
- Update Business Hours: Have your office hours changed since working from home? Make sure you update them in the ‘Info’ section of Google My Business.
- Update Contact Details: Make sure your contact details are up to date if you’re working from home.
- Google My Business Posts: You should be adding weekly Google My Business posts to your listing. These posts are a great way to communicate with everyone who sees your listing and also lets Google know your listing is still active and relevant.
- Reviews: Don’t forget to keep encouraging your happy customers to leave you a Google My Business Review. Online review signals, such as review quantity are one of the ranking factors for your listing and for local organic positions on search result pages. So this is a perfect time to ask for more 5 Star reviews from your customers.
Add Some FAQs
You should add some FAQs directly to your product and/or service pages on your website.
Adding FAQs helps to answer those burning questions about the specific product or service that your visitor or customer want to know right then and there at the moment they are researching.
By adding the FAQs to your products and services page, you can be sure they get all the information they need.
So what FAQs can you include on your pages, here are some examples to help get you started:
How much is xxx?
How do I set xxx up?
How do I maintain xxx?
What colours/styles do xxx come in?
Some of the benefits of FAQs:
- Save Time: Your customers are busy people (even at home), so you can save them time trying to read through your web copy, by having some simple FAQs on the page. Not only does it save your visitors time, but it also saves YOU time, as you will not receive unnecessary enquiries that can be easily found on your site.
- Great for SEO: By adding FAQs to your website, you have the opportunity to incorporate some strategic long-tail keywords to help improve your SEO.
- Builds Authority and Trust: If you know your customers, then you’ll know the questions they will be asking. Answering these questions shows you understand their needs which helps build trust with your audience and shows you are transparent.
Write Blog Articles
Your website’s blog is one of the best places to speak directly to your customers.
Blogs help you increase your web traffic by getting your website discovered for more keywords. Blogs also keep search engines happy because they love seeing frequent, fresh and relevant content added to a site.
So think about some topics that your customers might be interested in learning more about.
Try creating quality ‘evergreen’ blog content, which are topics that will remain relevant for the long term.
For example, if you operate a mechanic business, think about the best times of year to book your car in for a safety inspection, or the types of tyres for different driving conditions and usages.
These topics have a longer shelf life and will rank for a longer period of time.
There’s so much to choose from, so think about how you can create engaging and valuable content to satisfy your customer’s needs and start blogging!
Something to remember is to add internal links in your blog articles, to other relevant pages on your site, to improve your SEO.
Check out the article we wrote on 16 Actionable SEO Techniques to Increase Organic Traffic for more info.
Build Your Backlink Profile
You may be scratching your head wondering what backlinks are, let us explain.
Backlinks are an important SEO ranking factor because search engines, especially Google, will give more authority to websites that have a decent number of high-quality backlinks pointing to their website.
Search engines will consider those websites with those quality backlinks as more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.
Generally, if you have a digital marketing team looking after your SEO, they dedicate a lot of time in creating relevant backlinks to your website, through various content marketing strategies.
Because now things are financially tight, one way you can improve your backlink profile without becoming an overnight expert is by reaching out to any of your suppliers or partners and asking them if they can add a link on their website, to your site.
If you have any more questions about building backlinks or you can contact us here.
Internal Linking
Internal linking helps Google and your customers, understand your website better.
Internal linking is all about linking your product and service pages along with your blog pages together in a way that makes sense. By linking to the same page with the same keyword and similar variations, you will help that page to rank for your chosen keyword(s).
For example, every time we discuss SEO on our website, we will add a link back to our SEO services page. This helps this page rank for this keyword.
Let Google Help You
Google wants to help you so that’s why they have a whole bunch of amazing free tools that you can use to help you understand your website, it’s performance and discover ways to improve your SEO.
Some of our favourites that we use are:
- Google Search Console: This is your direct link to Google. This is where you can ask Google to index your pages and monitor what pages are indexed in search results. This free tool from Google will give you search traffic and performance information and flag any issues with your site, to ensure your website performs at it’s best.
- Google Analytics: Google Analytics allows you to track everything that happens on your website. It lets you measure visitors to your site, where they came from, demographics, pages visited, and everything to do with them interacting with your site.
- Google Page Speed Insights: The speed that your website pages load is so important to determine your search results. Google has included website loading speed as a search ranking factor. PageSpeed Insights is a free tool from Google, which gives you info on the speed of your website and what to fix to improve it for both desktop and mobile.
Final Thoughts
It is so important to maintain your digital strategy during this crisis or any crisis for that matter, to ensure you stay connected and engaged with your customers. Providing them with relevant and valuable content and maintaining and growing your search ranking positions for targeted keywords.
By and large, it’s business as usual for us here at MoreTraphic. We can help ensure your business maintains a strong online presence.
We’re here for you, even if we’re not there!
If you would like to know more about what our SEO service can do to boost your business; please contact hello@moretraphic.com or call 01782 229900.
