Some businesses are slow while others are thriving during the COVID times. Those businesses that hadn’t adopted the digital model are forced to do so. Even I have started a new blog on tech gadgets by upgrading my service to the Cox Internet Starter pack to meet my growing internet requirements. However, going digital alone is not enough. You need to have an effective and consistent SEO strategy as well.

Consumers are more confined to shop from local businesses. And there’s no bad time to publish new content. Your audience is probably sitting at home and searching for you already! If you are ready to leverage that and take your business to the next level, focus on these strategies:

1: Be Consistent

The results of SEO never appear overnight. It’s like sowing a seed and waiting for the crop to be ready. Therefore, you must be consistent with SEO practices. Even if all you can do is the bare minimum, keep on doing it.

Understandably, most businesses can’t spend money on paid SEO right now. If that’s you too, focus on the organic SEO practices only.

2: Curate Long and Evergreen Content

The content that gets ranked on the top pages of Google organically contains 1890 words on average. Use the extra time you have in the pandemic to create long content. Don’t forget to follow the skyscraper technique to make your content better. Just because it’s supposed to be lengthy, it doesn’t mean you compromise on quality.

Add images, videos, tables, infographics, as well as statistics to make it more engaging. Generate the content by following SEO best practices such as H1 and H2 tags, bullets, numbers, meta descriptions, small paragraphs, etc.

3: Focus on Local SEO

Now is the time for small businesses to shine. During the lockdown, customers didn’t spend their income shopping for luxury brands, instead, they spent it on essentials sold by small businesses. A lot of regions are still under lockdown and customers are confined to shop for local businesses within their communities.

These are some Local SEO best practices to follow to make your business stand out from the crowd:

Claim Google My Business Page
Use schema service
Add the NAP citation on your site
Set up social media signals
Get more and more reviews

4: Make Your Site Mobile Friendly

In these times, people are using their smartphones more than ever. So if your business website was not mobile-friendly already, this is the right time to work on it.

Mobile search accounts for more than half of search traffic from Google so without a mobile-friendly website, you are missing out on a lot of traffic. Fortunately, Google lets you test your website to see if it’s optimized for mobile. Use the mobile-friendly test to figure that out.

The goal is to offer a consistent browsing experience no matter what mobile device a visitor uses to browse your site.

5: Find the Right Keywords

Don’t stick to the same keywords you researched a year ago when you started your business. During the COVID-19 outbreak, a lot has changed and it’s likely you have a bunch of more keywords worthy keywords to target. Use the time you have to perform keyword research.

Search for new keywords related to your business. Use free and paid tools to conduct keyword research and find the search volume. Ideally, pick those keywords that have a higher search volume but medium to low competition. Otherwise, it will be impossible to rank on competitive keywords.

Once you have created a whole new library of keywords, incorporate them in your website. Here are the places where it’s an absolute must to insert keywords:

Title tags
URLs
Meta descriptions
Headings
Image alt text

6: Build a Solid Backlink Profile

Earning links back to your site is one of the core SEO strategies that are here to stay. Successful link building requires a time of time and effort so you should get started right away.

Unfortunately, not many small businesses give proper time and research to high quality backlinking. Having these links is like having search engine votes. It’s challenging to earn links and that too authority links.

Guest posting remains the top way of building authority backlinks. You can also build links by answering questions on HARO or Quora and use the broken link building tactics. Find niche bloggers and outreaching them is a time taking job, but the benefits outweigh the efforts.

How to Write Blog Posts For SEO

Conclusion

It’s said never let a good crisis go to waste. Amidst the COVID times, don’t lose hope. Offer something unique to your customers, something that makes their lives during lockdown easier. Online Cox bill pay sets a great example as its subscribers don’t have to leave their house to pay bills.