All business websites are experiencing a drop in organic traffic, other than healthcare, essential products and media houses.
The COVID-19 situation is beyond our control, but it leaves us with an opportunity to fix loopholes in our SEO and Content Marketing framework, right?
Screenshot explainer: Dropped Organic Traffic (due to CoVID-19) of one of my Travel Package Selling Website.
Marketing teams have always complained about lack of time to execute an SEO plan which took dozens of meetings to draft.
Well, there is no better time to execute that SEO plan than NOW.
Any SEO-Content Marketing plan takes months to bring the results, while paid campaigns do the same quickly. Hence, the execution of SEO-Content Marketing plan is prone to delays.
While most of the non-essential businesses are forced to slow down their marketing campaigns, it’s time for marketing managers and CXOs to rethink about the SEO plan.
SEO-Content Marketing strategies take time, especially for business websites and here we’ve at least, a couple of months. When done right, these same strategies can bring hundreds of qualified leads at no additional cost.
To give you a heads-up, I’m sharing this actionable SEO-Content Marketing plan. Here we go.
Task 1: Optimize Website Performance
It’s 2020 and your website should load fast!
There is no way you can deliver a top-notch user experience and gain top SERP positions with a slow-performing website. For a fact, Website speed is one of the ranking factors.
What you should do: Ask your UI/UX team to look for webpage development guidelines, which can make the webpages lightweight, use fewer server resources, and keep user data secure.
Learn more: Resource 1 | Resource 2
Task 2: Get Rid of Toxic Links: Disavow’em
Backlinks are important but not all kinds of!
Due to outdated knowledge of an SEO team member, following old-school link building strategies can result in a lot of low-quality external websites pointing towards your business website.
What you should do: Export the list of external websites linked to your business website from Google Search Console tool and a premium link building tool (I recommend Ahrefs), consolidate the CSV file and look for low-quality websites. Now upload a TXT file (having just the domain names of low-quality external websites) into Google’s Disavow tool.
Learn more: Resource 1 | Resource 2
Task 3: Focus on Top 10 Relevant Keywords
You can’t rank’em all!
It’s time for being real and find out about the top 10 keywords to focus and stick to them. These keywords should be highly relevant to your business/product and should have low to medium difficulty score (time and efforts required to achieve top ranking).
What you should do: Invest in a premium keyword finder tool (or make use of Google Ads Keyword Planner) and look for all the keywords related to your primary one. Look for the keyword metrics (volume, difficulty to rank, relevance) and finalize the top 10 keywords to focus from now on.
Learn more: Resource 1 | Resource 2
Task 4: Fix On-Page SEO Issues
An On-Page SEO optimized webpage is more likely to rank at a higher position on Google than otherwise.
Following on-page SEO metrics ensures that the content on a webpage is structured as per the norms, yielding the better results. A well-optimized webpage also improves the effectiveness of paid campaigns.
What you should do: The SEO and HTML-Designers should follow maximum possible on-page SEO guidelines, ensuring the highest possible score is achieved. Make them responsible for ensuring all future webpages are following the guidelines properly.
Learn more: Resource 1 | Resource 2
Task 5: Refresh Your Blog with Targeted Content
Everyone understands the importance of investing in content but very few do it well.
Content Marketing when done right can bring tons of targeted free traffic (organic), targeted leads, and increase awareness about your brand among the target audience.
What you should do: Research for keywords directly related to your business/product then look for topics which can be covered to target those keywords. Make sure the content team produces not just original content, but it should also have some fresh information. Stick to a publishing frequency and share them regularly on social platforms.
Learn more: Resource 1 | Resource 2
Task 6: Focus on Web 2.0
Web 2.0 can bring the quality backlinks (Free and Google-Safe) to your new website.
Not everyone is ready to invest hundreds of dollars to get their business promoting content (okay, Guest Post) on high-authority websites. Web 2.0 platforms come to the rescue!
What you should do: Ask the content team to produce quality content related to your business and then the SEO team can create web 2.0 profiles and publish the content on the platforms with relevant linkbacks.
Learn more: Resource
Task 7: Online Reputation Management
Make sure more and more people are talking good about your brand on the internet!
Social media, review platforms, and forums are the internet social places where people talk about a subject or a brand or a product. You need to make sure that people are talking about yours one on multiple relevant platforms.
What you should do: Look for the platforms where your target audience generally hang-out and try to interact with those who are either directly talking about your brand or indirectly talking about a product/service relevant to your brand.
Task 8: Marketing Automation Tools
“Automation is good, so long as you know exactly where to put the machine.” - Eliyahu Goldratt
Using the available marketing automation tools can finish up the day to day tasks required for lead generation, improve SEO rank, etc. They can even free up your team resources, allowing them to analyze each campaign in detail and focus on learning new tricks and tools.
What you should do: Look for available tools to automate marketing tasks and make sure the team is also analyzing the data available from those tools.
Task 9: Migrate to Fast & Secure Hosting
A slow and outdated hosting solution can impact all your marketing efforts!
With all our efforts to make the website fast and active dedicated resources focusing on content marketing and marketing automation, our web server should be equally fast and secure.
What you should do: Always go for the top of the line hosting solution provider who is keen to provide fast and secure web hosting. In the age of cloud hosting, you can easily find a lot of affordable managed cloud hosting providers like Cloudways.
Want All-Done SEO-Content Marketing Framework?
How about I pen down each of the shortcomings of your website (speed, security and hosting) along with content marketing plan (keywords and topics)?
It will be a custom SEO-Content Marketing Framework, specifically designed to fix SEO and Content Marketing issues of your business/product website.