Olivia Atkinson
Although many companies have stopped working, Google hasn’t. Which in turn means your SEO efforts shouldn’t stop either. If you stop it’s likely that you’ll have your top positions on Google taken away from you by competitors that are putting the work in now.
Getting ranked highly isn’t achieved overnight, it’s a long game and takes Google a while to notice you as the best. By getting in the work now, you’re preparing your company for when a version of normality returns, and your service or product is needed.
We've seen traffic stay consistent or rise with our own clients website traffic, those that have seen a big increase are those that supply to the healthcare sector.
The ‘New Normal’
As we face this pandemic, we are forced to make significant changes in our working life. Many are working from home, which they may have never done before. This in itself is a big challenge for teams, managers and workers relying solely on remote working with no backup.
The nation will be working from home for the foreseeable future at the moment, there is no definitive end date.
The best thing to do is plan and prepare for this going on for a long time, then any earlier release will be a bonus.
Although many have been furloughed, others are taking this time as an opportunity to get the admin and things that always got pushed to the bottom of the list done.
Unfortunately marketing is commonly unimportant to many, which is mad considering the impact it can have, done correctly.
Right now more people are searching online than ever before. Not all magazines are getting redirected home, trade shows aren’t happening, and we’re relying on LinkedIn to network. Digital is the only place to turn to for answers.
To help fast track your SEO, below are 6 tips you can implement now, to reap the reward of Google favouring you, when business returns to some normality.
Review Changes In User Behaviour
Make sure to use the data readily available to you, every single website should have Google Analytics integrated, its free! You should be looking at the data at least once a month to truly understand your audiences behaviour.
It may be that a product you don’t normally push is now getting a lot of interest due to the cleaning benefits it has.
Use the data to see which area of your website people are visiting most, can you improve that page. Can the images be updated with newer ones? Can you add a case study to go with it? Is there a piece of content they can download?
Make improvements first in the areas people are visiting the most.
Check For Gaps In Content
Leading on from the previous point, it’s worth doing a content audit across your website. Take a look at what competitors offer, could you match that or even better provide more information than them? If so do, now is the time to get your products and services positioned for the customer.
Review your normal process, are there files you would usually send as a follow up such as datasheets? Adapt these to be readily available to your visitors instantly.
Get Help With Professional SEO Support – Keyword & Competitor Research
You can conduct your own keyword and competitor research, however there are many benefits to getting an external party to research your market, these include:
- Costly software they have access to
- Looking at the market fresh, as a complete outsider
- They can point out new competitors you otherwise wouldn’t have known about.
- Discover search terms, general vocabulary used to find your solution, rather than product driven terminology
To find out how to do your own keyword research – Click here.
If you’d prefer an SEO expert to review your keywords and competitors then get in touch today.
Build Good Quality BACK-LINKS To Improve SEO
Getting good quality back-links from other websites is one of the many indicators to Google that says your website is of authority. This is again something that takes time and isn’t achieved overnight.
You can naturally achieve back-links from websites, however this is normally down to the level of content you put out there. The higher quality the content you have, the higher chance of other websites referencing yourself.
In the building products and construction industry, the best way to get back-links is through directories and magazines. Directories and magazines generally, although not always have high domain authority.
This means Google sees them as authoritative sources, so when Google see’s they’re linking to your website they think you are also of authority. There is obviously a lot more to it than that, but that’s the general idea.
Many product directories offer unlimited content upload for companies that list with them, this is great for link building.
For a deeper look into back-links discover how to link build here.
Ensure All Images Are Named And Have Alt Tags
This job is quite repetitive but contributes to improving your SEO. It should also become a habit for all future picture uploads. Google doesn’t read images at all, Google only reads text. So when your image is named 7438390.jpeg that is all Google sees.
As well as the file name itself, you get a second opportunity to tag your image with text, this is an image alt tag.
Going through your image files and renaming them keyword rich file names and ensuring the image alt tags reflect this too is an indicator Google will look at.
It’s so simple yet so many people just don’t find the time to do it. Let’s say you specialise in Gutter Cleaning in Yorkshire. If all your images had in them ‘Yorkshires Leading Gutter Cleaning Business’ or ‘Gutter Cleaning In Yorkshire’ then Google can read that and might even rank you higher because of it.
Whereas those with ‘7438390.jpeg’ are missing an opportunity to enhance their SEO.
For a more in depth look at optimising your images for SEO – click here.
Update Your Meta Data To Improve SEO
Meta data is what appear in search engine results. This consists of a meta title and a meta description. Both these should be optimised for SEO to tell your audience exactly what that page holds.
Sticking with gutter cleaning in Yorkshire, above are the results shown on Google. The blue linked Titles are the meta titles. The preview body text below is the meta description.
Sometimes companies website’s are setup to populate these automatically. The only problem with that is they can sometimes be generic and not tell the reader what the page ahead holds.
There are character limits to both meta titles and meta descriptions. As illustrated above the first result has a short description, the second has been written purposely and the third looks to be automatically generated and has an ellipsis so didn’t meet the criteria.
To be in Googles good books use your character count wisely. Get the key information in first and don’t worry about using keywords for ranking purposes in meta descriptions. Keywords can help when they reflect search terms, as you can see the keywords I searched for appear in bold.
However, meta descriptions help with SEO purely based on click through rates, not on keywords. So make sure your meta descriptions are encouraging and enticing so the reader wants to find out more.
For an in depth look at meta titles and descriptions – click here.
Conclusion
At this time, many of us are feeling the same, uncertain, scared, bored, fluctuating up and down. If you’re lucky enough to still be working then use this time to prepare for the future. SEO is a huge part of your websites’ success and your website should be your 24 hours a day sales rep.
By updating your website now you can take the time to really understand your audience, including what pages they look at the most and what search term they used to find you.
Making this a habit now will set you up in a good position when business returns. Those that have stopped championing SEO and marketing will have to do even more work to regain their position.
About Insynth
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major on construction marketing, we bring together construction marketing strategy, digital strategy, website design, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, sales automation, marketing automation and HubSpot CRM implementation to produce successful campaigns and great results for our clients.