SEO strategy can be easily divided into long-term actions and short-term engagements. In the long-term, it’s important to have a strong website platform optimized for search, a clear link building strategy, writing keyword-rich meta tags and enhanced content for your website to name a few.
What is often missed is that brands need to constantly work on the SEO strategy throughout the year to promote their business or drive engagement or to stay on top of the updates released by search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo). Often these strategies are considered reactive approaches but they are as critical as the proactive ones.
Key opportunities to capitalize upon year-round:
- Serve your customers with answers and NOT just links: With the increasing proliferation of mobile devices and rise in voice search quires Google direct answers have increased from showing up in 9% queries in January 2016 to 15% in July 2016, a 67% increase in just 6 months*. Customers desire a direct answer to questions rather than looking up links to websites with the answers. Doing research on social media channels, review sites, asking your team and customers will help you know more about your brand and those insights can be turned into questions and answers that be posted on your website to assist your customers.
- Promote your own milestones: Released a new product, hired a top talent to lead a vertical, acquired a business, all these are significant moments for your business as well for your key stakeholders, make sure you broadcast these news and milestones via your corporate blog or press releases. These opportunities create a buzz and top of the mind recall for your business additionally it creates more valuable content and links for search engines to index.
- Consider partnerships with industry bodies: Every industry is represented by an education and trade association, forming partnerships with these bodies opens new doors to publish content, package existing content for a different audience, host a webinar, a fire side chat or a panel discussion. All these are great opportunities to promote your business and generate incoming links pointing to your site.
- Use your competitor’s actions to your advantage: Just like you, your competitor is also promoting their business, tracking your competitor, be it their blogs, social interactions, emails, webinars allow you to understand where they are focusing on and with that you might be able to get clues to build your next promotion, or a branding campaign.
- Keyword research for your brand: Call it old fashioned but identifying the new keywords that customers use to find you and your competitors will always be useful. Creating content around the new-found keyword themes would help you to stay on top of your customer’s actual needs.
- Repackage your content assets: Content is created under a context and savvy marketers use the same content idea in many different forms to showcase the key points. A white paper can be easily turned into an info graphic, a blog post, a social media update. All these assets assist in building your SEO authority, moreover it allows you to increase the life of the content and decreases the need to create new content all the time.
- Audit your SEO presence: Finally, from where we started, Google is always releasing a new update to improve the user experience, stay on top of the channels and websites that your business is listed on, or “linked to”. Don’t buy links in bulk or from irrelevant directories as that may end up getting you a penalty in the future. An easy way would be scan your business every quarter to know your listings status from important channels.
SEO is constantly evolving, trends fall off almost as quickly as they emerge. Staying on top of trends means to constantly working on the long-term and short-term strategy. If you have additional questions please leave a comment below, visit our website, or email us at sales@milestoneinternet.com.