Now more than ever SEO must be a key component of your digital marketing strategy. The ongoing pandemic has caused businesses to re-evaluate their marketing efforts and pivot to align with the “new normal” – which is shifting away from traditional marketing to a digital first strategy.

Current marketing trends demonstrate why you need SEO to be competitive in the marketplace:

• 64% of marketers actively invest time in search engine optimization (SEO).
• 76%of small-to-medium sized businesses say they have upskilled in areas such as SEO, social media, and data analytics.
• 70–80% of search engine users are only focusing on the organic results.
  
  

Key components to an effective SEO strategy

Google and other search engines have spent years adjusting and perfecting their algorithms to crawl, index, and serve the best content to the user. It is a rapidly changing environment and companies must constantly optimize their websites to rank high in search results, here’s how:

1. Deliver a great user experience (UX). UX is how visitors interact with your website. A good UX design will provide a valuable and meaningful experience to the user. Understanding what the user needs and how they navigate through your website is a critical part of the design. If your website has a high bounce rate or a low time on page rate, your UX may need some work.
2. Build a strong technical SEO foundation. The technical aspects of your website are becoming more of a factor in ranking. This includes page speed, site load speed, missing H1/H2 tags or Alt tags, missing meta data or duplicate meta data, and broken links. Every month you should perform a technical audit of your website and use Google Search Console to help identify any issues that may be impacting your ranking.
3. Incorporate your content marketing strategy with your SEO strategy. SEO and content marketing are inextricably linked. You can’t have good SEO without good content. Content marketing should include keywords, provide relevant backlinks within the content, and be current and relevant. For 2021, marketers expect a 57% increase in blog content and 50% increase in video production, all the more reason to make sure these two strategies align.
4. Focus on user intent. Google’s whole purpose is to provide the user with the absolute best in search results. Results that match not just the words typed into the search bar, but match user intent. Earlier SEO was all about one-word keywords, now user intent is determined by other factors using AI and Machine language. To optimize for user intent, understanding where the user is in the buying journey and what information they need, map user intent to content and use more long-tail keywords.
5. Increase your brand awareness. The concept of Google’s E-A-T has been around since 2018, and focuses on Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Given the current challenges we face not just with the pandemic but also with cybersecurity, optimizing for E-A-T should be a key component of your SEO strategy. Quality matters – content should appear to the user as if it was written by subject matter experts. Your website should be viewed as a valuable source for information matching search intent, and it should be viewed as trustworthy and accurate. To optimize for E-A-T, include high quality backlinks, keep content current, and make sure your facts are straight.

The lingering impacts of the pandemic will continue to be felt well into 2021 and businesses will need to adjust their marketing strategies in order to be successful.

Contact Conveyance Marketing Group for help with SEO and all your other digital marketing.

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