Investing in your SEO strategy
Many businesses are still closed and facing much uncertainty about when their operations will return to normal. This has forced a lot of owners to suspend their paid digital ad campaigns. What is normally a revenue driver can become a drain on limited resources in the virtually closed economy we are experiencing. However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t still be successful in the digital space and stay ahead of the game for the resumption of regular business operations. Now is the time to reinvest in one of your most reliable and cost-free methods of advertising; your SEO strategy.
What is your SEO Lacking?
SEO often falls on the backburner for busy owners and marketers. It’s in the back of your mind, but paid initiatives tend to get more attention. Now, with quarantine keeping many ad campaigns suspended in limbo, it’s the perfect opportunity to shore up your non-paid campaigns. Here are a few areas to revisit and improve while paid search and remarketing ads are on hold:
Indexing & Crawl Issues – The first thing you should check is that your site has been indexed. If you want to show up in search results for Google or any other search engine, you need to have your site indexed. And you don’t want to be indexed just once – you want search engines to re-index your site on a regular basis. Here is a simple way to check if your site is properly indexed:
- Go to Google Search Console
- Navigate to the URL inspection tool
- Paste the URL you’d like Google to index into the search bar.
- Wait for Google to check the URL
- Click the “Request indexing” button
If your site is already indexed, that’s good news. However, there is always room to improve. Google Search Console (GSC) also allows you to monitor different aspects of your website like when it was last crawled, any indexing errors, security issues, etc. Correcting crawl errors, site speed issues, and security problems will help you rank higher and improve your customer experience.
Keywords – Optimize your page with accurate and unique title tags, meta descriptions, and page headers. The title for your homepage can list the name of your website/business and could include other bits of important information like the physical location of the business or maybe a few of its main focuses or offerings. Try to use brief but descriptive titles. Meta descriptions should accurately summarize the page content and be unique to each page. Use meaningful headings to indicate important topics and structure for your content.
Local Search & Reviews – When reviewing your local listings like Google My Business, there are 5 main things to focus on:
- Get your listing claimed and verified
- Enter complete and up-to-date information about your business
- Make sure your hours are accurate and updated for holidays and closures
- Read and respond to your customer reviews
- Add as many relevant photos and videos as you can
Link Building – Building links is a major factor in how Google will rank your web pages in search results. If you have lots of high-quality links leading to your site, Google will consider it popular and meaningful, leading to higher rankings. Remember that this is an outreach activity. You must reach out to people to get them to link to your page, and link building should create backlinks that attract your target audience to your site.
Consistency – NAP consistency stands for Name, Address, Phone number. Creating NAP consistency across your website, business listings, social media profiles, and local directories. This is an important factor for SEO ranking but also helps to keep your customers from getting confused about how to contact you. A simple audit of all your contact info can be as beneficial as it is easy!
What can we do?
1-2-1 Marketing has experts ready to help you get the most out of your SEO efforts. Whether you are an existing customer looking to improve your organic search strategy, or you're looking for someone to help take the reins and manage this for you, we are here to help. Contact me at apettus@1-2-1marketing for more information on how we can improve your SEO initiatives.
