As businesses face quieter times, here are 3 SEO tasks to do on your website for a successful second half on the year
Experts are now warning that the dreaded global economic recession following the worsening COVID-19 pandemic is beginning to hit. Global markets are still in turmoil as governments and central banks in various parts of the world come to terms with the economic impacts of the pandemic.
Although the situation has favoured some retailers, both online and offline traders, expect negative business impacts in the long term. In a recent survey, 47 per cent of retailers said they expected some downtime due to the virus outbreak.
However, there is reason to be optimistic that the pandemic will pass or at least come under control soon. Once that happens, the markets will normalise and gradually recover. In anticipation of this, you should ensure that your website is ready for the second half of the year. As businesses face difficult times, here are three things you could do right now to prepare and update your site.
Write Blog Posts to Publish Later in The Year
This is an excellent time to create blog posts for publishing in the next couple of months. The hardest part of writing blog posts, especially for future publications, is coming up with engaging and relevant topics.
Let your audience guide you in selecting blog topics; ask yourself what your audience would like to read about and what really matters to them. Your readers could be looking for answers to specific questions or solutions to unique problems. Identifying and addressing the needs of your audience is what gives the content value. Also, keep the posts relevant to your niche and the message you’re trying to get across.
Check and Update Meta Title and Descriptions
Meta titles act as name tags for webpages. During live browsing, the tags are displayed on the browser’s title bar, which helps users know which page they’re on and what it’s about. Search engine bots can also read meta titles, and they often display them as headers in SERPs.
A meta description is a brief paragraph or series of sentences that describe a webpage succinctly so users and search bots can understand what the page is about. Meta descriptions and titles are essential in guiding both readers and search engines to find your content or webpages.
Google has some useful guidelines on how to create effective meta tags and descriptions. On top of that, it helps to regularly check and update meta information. Call it housekeeping – make sure that all meta tags meet the required character count, relay the right messages, and are optimised for the relevant keywords. Make changes if necessary.
Write a FAQ Section on Your Website
Many online entrepreneurs only add a FAQ page to their site as an afterthought, and some don’t bother at all. In a search environment soon to be dominated by voice search, well-designed FAQ pages are doing a lot of heavy lifting for their host sites. FAQs help the users find out information for themselves without having to ask the site’s administrators or support. They also boost SERP ranking and visibility, particularly by leveraging Google’s Featured Snippets.
A FAQ section is one of the easiest pages to design. However, there is a method to structuring the questions and answers:
- Use a Q&A format
- Keep questions and answers short and precise
- Begin every answer with a “Yes” or “No” to save the reader’s time
- Keep the language simple
- Use first-person voice for the questions
- Embed links to more detailed literature in the answers where necessary
Also, remember to come up with questions that are relevant to both your business and the audience. Cover the most common questions and queries that your customers come to you with. You can also lookup questions on forums such as Quora and even on Google’s Autosuggest feature when populating the FAQ page.
Conclusion
This quiet period is a great opportunity to prepare your website and business for the near future as we wait for things to turn around. Even with low sales, you should work toward benefiting your business. And like many entrepreneurs, you probably have a bit of spare time to do some much-needed prepping and housekeeping on your website to guarantee success in the second half of 2020.
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