The pandemic has forced many businesses to quickly adapt their marketing and SEO strategies to stay in business. Because some parts of the country are opening while others aren’t, staying relevant through SEO is critical to keeping up with the competition. If you are in a position where you have had to pull back with your digital marketing efforts during COVID, our list of tips can help you get restarted and back on track.
1. Focus on Rich Results Optimization
Rich results are details of the search engine results page (SERP) that draw the eye and get more interaction. This is ideal SERP real estate for small to medium size businesses. Examples of rich results include featured snippets at the top of the SERP that appear as either a paragraph, table, or list.
These are usually the straightforward answers you are looking for that appear at the top of the page when you’re doing a quick Google search. Winning this highly coveted space gives you major authority. Google won’t even consider you eligible for this unless you rank organically on the first page.
To shoot for rich results, you have to have a solid SEO plan in place. Start by re-evaluating your current content and consider refreshing the language so that it’s more in line with the majority of rich results. Note that this language should be in question/answer format and kept conversational in tone. Be sure to also keep your content organized with basic HTML and microdata for Google.
Remember that Google is constantly updating its algorithm so that input is more closely aligned with the right results, so if you’re stagnant with your SEO strategy you will lose your ranking to competitors.
2. Optimize Google My Business Profile
The local strategy for Google My Business is all about…
- Distance– the physical location from where the search is happening
- Relevance– how well a local listing matches a search
- Prominence– how well-known a business is (traffic to site and number of positive reviews)
It’s important to keep your profile up to date, complete, and descriptive as possible. Don’t use sales-y or promotional language in your business description, rather use it as an elevator pitch that encourages people to navigate to your website for more information. Here are some more tips on optimizing your Google My Business profile:
- Use high-quality photos of your storefront and interior of your business to build trust
- Be transparent about your COVID policies and hours, and regularly update them as needed
- Keep the information consistent with the information on your website
- If your business doesn’t have a physical location, add a service area to your profile rather than an address
- Use the Q&A/FAW feature on your GMB profile to provide more information to searchers
- Choose two or three business service categories to list your business under
3. Promote Educational Content
Any good SEO strategy requires the distribution of high-quality content. This content should be educational and authentic. Feature that content your business creates on your blog or website, your GMB profile, social media, and email marketing. When you continuously update and refresh content that’s already ranked, you can help expose it to a wider audience as more keywords start to rank for that content.
Some other ways to promote your educational content:
- Social media syndication– Post across all relevant social media platforms and try to vary the types of media you post (IE. video, .pdfs, text posts, slide decks, etc.).
- Co-marketing– Partner with local industry experts or niche influencers to cross-promote your content.
- Link building– A time consuming but powerful SEO tactic, getting people to link your content in their own content builds great authority. Ask your industry partners to include your links.
- Email marketing– By keeping in contact with your email database and sharing your content through email, you support your SEO rankings because your business is six times more likely to get a click to the website from an email campaign than a tweet.
Conclusion
SEO is crucial for getting your digital marketing back on track in the midst of the pandemic. Depending on your aptitude and amount of free time, you could DIY, but SEO implementation can be very time-consuming and if you don’t know all the ins and outs of Google best practices, you are just as likely to hurt your ranking as you are to help it. The Green Hills Group offers customized SEO services from your basic monitoring to enterprise level strategy.3 Tips for Restarting Your Digital Marketing Efforts
Ready to get help with your SEO? Schedule a free 30-minute consultation with one of our SEO strategists to understand where your business stacks up against the competition.
