COVID Impact and SEO: A Checklist for Small Businesses to Step Up SEO Game
Rank Google Map Listing
Every small business often commits to this mistake of setting up a Google My Business Account and leaving it behind after filling the details. Map listings are occupying the top positions in SERP for localized keywords. However, it's not as easy as ranking website pages. But the advantage is not many businesses focus on ranking map listings, any firm can have an early advantage here.
Efforts to improve map listing rankings can also influence your local SEO efforts and positive impact on overall rankings, to rank more pages for locally relevant keywords.
Mix Traditional Marketing with SEO
The best thing about SEO is, there are thousands of ways in which you can build links. The more you get creative, the more link earning opportunities you get. For a local business, putting more effort into traditional marketing for local promotion efforts can yield positive signals for SEO. Since the target audience size is relatively small for a local market, not much money has to be spent on promotion. It can boost brand awareness and will result in earning natural links from local websites - A big ranking factor for local SEO.
Locally Relevant Content Marketing
Content marketing is very vast and a big platform for promotion. Most often target content marketing for an international or national level audience. However, if they could further break it down and publish locally relevant content suiting the local aspiration of people, it can yield a better result, and easy to scale and measure it.
How can SEO agencies help small businesses?
Adopting a growth marketer mindset is what SEO professionals have to do now. So how to make a positive growth impact for the weeks and months to come?
- Focus on the DATA available to formulate ideas and strategies
- Dig deep into new search trends and online behavior of your target group
- From the insights, come up with new content creation ideas
- Match the value of your products/services with that of the needs/wants of target customers
Ditch the conventional methods
Forget the average keyword search volume, for now, look for the trending keywords in Google Trends. The average search volume wouldn't give an exact picture of what people are searching for. For example, Vacation, Travel Insurance and all have huge historical volumes, but less search now, hence developing content around it now is a waste of money.
The surge in online search means people are looking for more quality content, upgrade the traditional guest post approach, and go for a guest blogger by providing thought leadership contents (leverage the thought leader's profile). Who wouldn't love to publish a story written by a CEO on a very critical topic that could serve enterprise problems? The benefits are two-fold, branding content for you, a good backlink, and valuable content for the publishing site.
Updating Old Contents
Content is the king! However, it's very costly to generate good quality content and it's advised to cut the content budget. Rework and update the old blogs, case studies, whitepapers by adding more relevant data.
Make a list of blogs that rank outside the top 10 from Search Console. Find out the keywords for which it is currently ranked. Add more content around these keywords, and you can see more organic traffic inflow in no time.