COVID-19 didn’t only change people’s lives around the world. It also affected the way everyone interacted with the retail industry. Socialization and shopping shifted to online activities that implemented lockdowns and physical distancing measures.
For many businesses, the shift to increasingly remote and digital work might be how they continue well into the future. They must use this opportunity to intensify their digital campaigns to keep their companies in their customers’ focus. Organic search results should be increased by building highly ranked SEO campaigns, not just Google Ads.
According to a BrightEdge report, SEO is more important than ever with the changing landscape that emphasizes paid and organic search to drive traffic to websites. Since people interact with brands and companies through electronic devices, businesses must do what it takes to draw customers online.
Reason 1: Long-Term Relevance
Focusing on your SEO strategy will bear fruit later. Build your customer relationships and establish their loyalty to your brand so that when things stabilize, you can move forward with confidence.
Per Patrick Reinhart, Conductor’s vice president of digital strategies, trees should be planted for SEO now. They will provide shade from the sun on hot days in the future.
Businesses should create content that deals with present-day people and what might happen later. Lane R. Ellis—a social media and content manager—tweeted about B2B marketing, saying that companies who expand their SEO campaigns would see their search success grow after the pandemic.
Reason 2: Competitive Edge
Another reason to utilize SEO is that it levels the playing field for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). SMEs tend to focus their SEO efforts on one business, whereas their larger competitors have more than one facet of their business to focus on.
Each time you share a new piece of content and add an entry to your blog, you raise your name recognition in your market. The most effective way to access this opportunity is to create high-quality evergreen content that includes keywords related to COVID-19 and your industry. When you do this, you will increase your sales.
Reason 3: Telecommuting
The pandemic caused a boom in remote workers and marketing companies. As a result, many new services were created to meet the demands, such as SEO platforms that improved B2B companies’ efficiency with marketing. The success of B2B marketers working from home has probably inspired the growth of SEO applications.
SEO is becoming an increasingly powerful tool for marketing. According to Orainti founder Aleyda Solis, structured data will be vital as we see more and more mobile searches, voice control for Google assistant, and predictive search features. She also projects growth in the technical SEO ecosystem.
Therefore, retailers and customers will continue interacting online instead of physically since the internet makes business transactions more convenient and efficient now than ever.
Reason 4: Searching Online Will Keep Booming
As experienced during the pandemic and in the following years, Pay-per-Click via Google Ads and organic search engine traffic dominate web marketplaces. Marketers also trusted search engine optimization strategies to engage their audiences.
SEO is one of the most stable and common marketing channels to promote brands, products, and services. They believe SEO is a cost-effective marketing channel that will produce results.
Research has shown that 65 percent of advertisers believe businesses will spend more on advertising campaigns to achieve direct sales. This statistic made SEO the primary channel for marketers in B2C and B2B sectors.
Reason 5: Evergreen Content Are Must-Haves
Because of the importance evergreen content plays in the online marketing world, you must focus on incurring views over time. As a good practice, you can combine evergreen with trending topics to get more traffic and plan for future implementations simultaneously.
Not only does evergreen content build your online presence and portfolio, but it also becomes a foundation for future searches since they are perpetually relevant to your customers.
According to SEO specialist Jill Whalen, excellent SEO work will only get better and better. Businesses should only implement their search engine strategies by keeping up with their ranking algorithms.
The Best SEO Practices
SEO helps if you know how to use it well as an advertising tool. If you can find a way to reach the top ten search results and appear on Google’s first page, you will see results.
Why? Based on a HubSpot study, 75 percent of users only looked at their first page results during their search.
Some best SEO practices to get you to first-page status without depending on Google Ads are:
- Compelling Title Tags and Meta Descriptions: When optimizing your website for search engines, Google’s algorithm emphasizes your pages’ title tags and meta descriptions. Title tags, which you can find at the top of the results, directly impact your content’s visibility during searches. Meanwhile, meta descriptions, which show up below your title tags, affect how likely a user will click on a result.
When creating your title tags, make them descriptive but concise. Also, include keywords that reflect your content’s subject matter and are relevant to your target audience’s search intent. Additionally, avoid using the same title tags and keyword stuffing.
- Content Aligned with Search Intent: Align your online content with search intent to improve the visibility of your content on Google. This describes the types of user intent that are common in Google searches.
Navigational searches involve finding a specific website, app, or organization, while informational searches require finding detailed data. When customers look for a product or service with commercial intent but are not yet ready to buy, they want transactional information. Always consider what the user is searching for when you create your content.
- Internal Links Keyword Usage in URL: Developing a well-structured URL improves your website’s visibility to search engines and visitors. It’s short, easy to read, and includes essential keywords. Stop words should be avoided to make the URL concise.
- Long-Form Content: One of the best practices for SEO is writing long-form articles over 3,000 words. However, ensure that the content is substantial and not padded, or else Google’s penalty may either be a lowered index ranking or expulsion from the index altogether.
- Optimized Images: Images can improve your website’s overall appeal and user experience. However, they can harm the user experience if you fail to do it correctly. That’s why you need to optimize your images.
You can use the JPEG or PNG image formats and compress them to increase loading speeds. Include alt text to make them visible to Google, and use free tools like ImageOptim, ShortPixel, and TinyPNG.
- Optimized Websites: Google supports websites with an excellent user experience and rewards them by raising the ranking of those websites in its search engine results. Make your website mobile-friendly and fast to ensure your website offers a good user experience.
Some strategies to improve your website include using a responsive layout, eliminating intrusive pop-ups, adding subheadings, screenshots, images, and videos in the content, and using white space for readability.
Make SEO Work for You Without Google Ads
SEO empowers companies to engage with their audiences and prepare business in the years to come by incorporating the best practices into your current campaign. High visibility will help your pages show up in a lot of searches. However, it is best to defer to the experts to ensure your business does it right and reaps the rewards in due time.
Contact New Digital Marketing Agency today to fully experience the power of SEO. We are a digital marketing agency that drives measurable and repeatable results through a combination of marketing strategy and specialized execution, such as SEO, Facebook Ads, and Google Ads in Toronto. Speak to us today for digital marketing that works!
