How to win the SEO game when you don’t have time to play it

SEO — or search engine optimization — is, like many things, too often taken for granted. The subtle nuances of SEO are often ignored with businesses all over the world incorrectly choosing to ignore SEO opportunities on a regular basis.

All too often, you see companies do a number of offline activities — such as hosting a networking event, holding a creative morning, or organizing something for charity — that doesn’t get written about in an online platform. This is a horrible waste of a great SEO opportunity, offline activities like these are golden gifts when it comes to boosting SEO of your website or blog. In fact, keeping an online diary of offline events helps people find your site when searching about the event.

An example of this is New York’s Fashion Week that takes place twice a year, every year. It is is one of the major fashion weeks in the world, with an estimated impact of $887 million dollars.

While their site includes beautiful videos of the models in the runway, backstage, and in the streets, they fail to interview them and write about what is going on their mind as they prepare for the events. Doing so would provide useful content that visitors would enjoy, and search engines would use to dramatically increase the number of keyword rankings.

The videos are also a big missed opportunity because while they are professionally produced, they are not optimized for SEO. Google doesn’t know what they are about, and won’t be able to rank them for relevant terms. Fortunately, this is relatively easy to fix by following Google guidelines on video SEO.  

Keep FAQs up to date

A frequently asked questions (FAQ) page is vital to the overall well being of your website. If customers are asking different questions however — which they naturally will do over time as your products and services develop — you need to make sure your FAQ page is kept up to speed.

The traditional sense of an FAQ page — 15 or so generic questions that are answered monosyllabically — is not what we are talking about when we say there are SEO benefits to having this type of page. Rather, several techniques can be employed to leverage some fantastic SEO points from answering those frequent customer questions.

Instead of leaving an FAQ page to gather dust, companies should theme their FAQ pages, with hard links to separate blog posts for each question. This saves readers the hassle of having to contend with an aggressive FAQ page that runs through multiple scrolls, which is a boring and inefficient way of answering customer queries.

At the bottom of the page, where possible, also strive to place a ‘call to action’ that directs users to a handy guide that will help them better navigate the site. The reason this FAQ methodology is so powerful is because it allows users to run their own show, provides more space for questions, where answers can be shown elsewhere, and it is a fantastic opportunity for internal links and related SEO strategies. Why miss out?

Linkback your PR output

Scoring great media coverage through PR is of course a reason to celebrate in and of itself. However, in the event that a publication covers your website, it is always a good idea to make sure that the piece in question links back to your company website. Many times the journalists covering your company will mention it, but simply forget to add a link, so sending a friendly reminder is a good idea. You don’t want to waste that SEO potential, do you?

Additionally, when you write it’s also a good idea to link to relevant articles that expand and validate your points. In addition to helping your audience develop a deeper understanding of your topic, the authors of the articles you link regularly check who is referencing their work. If they like what they see in your writing, they will generally remember to reference your articles in their work too.

Wrapping up

So, going forward remember to make use of all of the above to improve your SEO presence in a few simple moves. Make sure offline activity is well documented, and easily located, online for potential clients and users to find. Keep FAQ sections up to date, not stale and dusty, and also make sure that any precious media coverage you get links back to your page, and vice versa. By following this advice, your SEO score can only improve, bringing benefits of greater website traffic.