Driving ROI in SEO in Challenging Times

Leverage Resources That Already Exist:

5 SEO Experts Reveal Tips to Drive SEO Results in Challenging Times

Budget cuts, staff reduction, and a focus on essential spending are all part of the new lexicon surrounding the idea of what “normal” looks like for businesses in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Executives want to know exactly how to keep costs in check and continue to drive revenue, especially when economic times are turbulent and discretionary spending is carefully monitored.

How can businesses execute and drive results with the resources they currently have?

If you’re an SEO for an enterprise brand, you know first-hand that it’s not always the massive, costly projects that drive results. As a matter of fact, it’s usually the “quick wins” or low-hanging fruit opportunities that offer the most value!

When spending is audited and non-critical operations are cut, it’s important to focus the opportunities that drive results to prove to leadership the revenue opportunities that exist within SEO. Your search visibility is the driving force that allows your business to continue to successfully serve customers, which increases overall reputation, reach and, ultimately conversions. 

In this expert-contributed guide for our SMX Next attendees, you can expect to learn:

• What your new SEO playbook looks like in challenging economic times
• How to refresh your existing site content quickly and easily to recapture ranking losses
• How to adapt to both temporary and permanent changes in the marketplace
• What technical improvements you should implement that have the highest potential to impact your search visibility
• Where Google is rewriting your page titles and how to reclaim control and improve click thru rate

The following guide walks through the exact, actionable approach and processes to follow to prove to your executives the potential for quick return on SEO investment when they say, “Show me the money!”

Make Sure Your House is in Order: New "SEO Basics" Playbook

Presented by Nakul Goyal, Director of Consumer Marketing at Carfax

No matter your industry or business type, it’s imperative to start with a solid foundation before attempting to build up your success - whether you’re returning to business operations after COVID-19 or just beginning to venture into new business verticals. 

With over 20 years of SEO experience under his belt, digital marketing expert Nakul Goyal offers his fundamental approach to your SEO playbook in his presentation below: 

The following examples must be included as priorities in your SEO playbook to advance your SEO growth in this “new normal”:

1. Title Tags. Crawl your site to make sure you have unique title tags for every page on your site.
Recommended Reading: How to Write Optimized Page Title Tags

2. Internal Links. Ask yourself: Can both humans and search engines navigate to your site easily? Your pages can only rank if they are findable to your target audience and Googlebot.
Recommended Reading: Internal Links Workflow: How to Optimize and Gain More Site Authority

3. Self-canonical Tag. Conduct a site crawl to determine that you have not created any duplicate pages that plagues your site.
Recommended Reading: What’s the Best Route for Duplicate Content?

4. XML Sitemaps. Submit these to respective search engines that cover all your site’s pages.
Recommended Reading: How to Create a Sitemap and Submit to Google

5. Reciprocal HREFLang tag. This is particularly important for international brands so that search engines know where to send users on your site.
Recommended Reading: 12 Common Hreflang Mistakes and How to Prevent Them

With these foundational but simple steps to address the basics, ensure that your house is in order to make way for incremental growth in your SEO success. Our SEO platform includes site audits with unlimited crawled pages and projects that will help you discover opportunities at scale.

Quick Traffic Wins: How to Address Decaying Content and Waning Rankings

Presented by Claye Stokes, Vice President at Red Ventures

Old and outdated content that isn’t relevant to your user can actually hurt your overall site health, especially when your pages are no longer driving notable organic traffic. 

Which brings us to a pop-quiz: 

What can you do when your content sees a natural decay? Should you:

A) update it to revive it,
B) create new content to re-approach rankings, or
C) all of the above?

If you answered C, you are correct - all of the above options are possible solutions to solving the content chaos problem! But, before you go plugging content holes and creating even more chaos down the line, you must prioritize what content should be removed and what content should receive an update on your site. 

Once you decide on what content needs to be updated, you then need to refresh the content with relevant and purposeful content that provides value to your audience. 

Digital marketing expert Claye Stokes, an SEO with 12 years of enterprise experience, offers his approach to content decay featured in his presentation above outlining the steps to take that apply less resources and can drive quick results. 

How to Freshen Up Your Content 

Your first step in refreshing your existing content is prioritizing what to update. This small step is a tremendous help in outlining what to tackle first, making the task at hand more manageable for you or your team.

Inside your rank tracking tool, collect all of the competing URLs in your SERPs and run those URLs through your crawler tool. Use the date modified value in the source code to see when the piece of content was last updated. 

Here's the regex pattern that proved helpful for Claye in most common date formats he's run across:

dateModified\"\:(?:.\"|\")([0-9-]{10}|[0-9\s,a-zA-Z]*)

We also recommend using Google Search Console and Google Analytics to determine which content can use a refresh. This process requires no additional investment other than the tools that you already have at your disposal!

GSC shows content and pages on your site that are just within reach of ranking well but never made it onto page one and require minimal optimization effort. Look at content that has slipped from high rankings to the second or third page of Google (rank positions 11-40). 

Alternatively, you can use an SEO platform to perform these tasks at scale. seoClarity integrates with Google Search Console data providing users with the ability to filter by page, content types, device, keywords, and more. 

To learn our exact process within seoClarity, read our post on how to refresh old content with seoClarity using Content Fusion for content optimization and analysis. 

seoClarity offers a free Chrome extension to get page by page insights and suggestions for what each page is relevant for. Download our free content optimizer, Spark. 

Now That the Dust Has Settled, What is the Sustained Demand?

Presented by Eric Enge, Principal at Perficient Digital Marketing Solutions BU

The pandemic has caused global uncertainty in a lot of industries. With such volatility, how can your business do more than just survive the current market environment and actually find ways to prosper?

The answer lies in providing the products and services that are in higher demand now and are looking to sustain in this current climate of business.

One way to easily determine this from an SEO perspective is to follow a simple, but effective, process, as outlined by SEO legend, Eric Enge: 

1. Simply talk to your customers and ask them how their needs have changed. Make a plan to adapt or adjust what you are offering based on their feedback. Leverage social media or customer reviews - however you currently communicate with customers is the best way to approach this task.

2. Do some research on what is driving users to your site. Find these potential opportunities based on content from your own site. Using Google Search Console, locate pages to determine higher demand opportunities that weren’t there before and are currently driving traffic based on the current market landscape. seoClarity integrates GSC data and offers trend charts to easily see the keywords and pages receiving increased traffic. 

In an example we’ve seen with some of our clients, let’s say a beer or liquor brand creates content for a virtual happy hour and in turn see an increased demand or low-hanging fruit opportunities driving traffic to their site. It would be prudent to create a new page of happy hour content or update previously existing happy hour content to cover the virtual aspect of happy hours in the wake of COVID-19.

This use case exists in nearly every industry! Finance brands should consider loan and mortgage services pages to answer the demand in that industry that’s sure to persist. Home delivery is another service that has become more applicable across multiple industries facing the “new normal” Which leads us to our next step… 

3. Use Google Trends to find demand opportunities related to your search queries to see how your target audience trends have changed. In evaluating these shifts, marketers make inferences about where to switch gears based on what users are currently searching (and may continue searching in the current market). 

At seoClarity, we integrated Google Trends data within the platform for a rolling 90 days to help our clients scale by making it extremely easy to identify the aforementioned opportunities they wouldn't have previously considered for their site. 

4. Take what you’ve learned from your research and update your site content to reflect what your users are looking for right now as well as what they will be searching for in the weeks, months and years ahead as our consumers continue to adjust their buying behaviors.

Focusing on the latest demand in the market and following the audience-driven trends could be the key to driving your business toward success in our “new normal”.

Recommended Reading: How to Determine Valuable SEO Insights in the Wake of the Coronavirus

Click For More Information: Perficient and their digital marketing and SEO services >