There is no doubt that the coronavirus pandemic that is going on at the moment is changing the ways that we are working and running our businesses – both temporarily and perhaps in the long-term. Although fewer businesses are able to operate as they normally would, it is important that we all prepare ourselves for when the outbreak is over and the world gets back to ‘normal’.

Despite the fact that you might not be able to do your ‘normal’ work, there is plenty that businesses can be doing in the meantime to be able to bounce back strongly from the impact of COVID-19. And one of those is content marketing and SEO.

This ‘downtime’ can give you the time that you need to create some great web content for your business, give your SEO a boost, and ensure that you are ready to take off again when this is all over.

When you are creating content, there are a few aspects that you should consider to ensure that your content to be as effective as possible:

Write for the User

To determine which web pages rank highly on the SERPs, search engines such as Google have algorithms that will find the pages most relevant to the searcher. The search engines want people to continue to use their services, and so the most important thing for them is to display the pages that are the most relevant and informative to their searchers.

This means that your pages should be written for users and NOT for the search engines. By putting out good quality, informative, and useful content you are more likely to be rewarded with a higher ranking in the SERPs.

Keyword Research

When you are planning a content marketing strategy it is important first to carry out some keyword research.  This means researching the terms that people are likely to use to be able to find your website. There are plenty of tools that you can use to help you to carry out this keyword research, or you can speak to an SEO consultant.

From this keyword research, you can then go on to plan your content, ensuring that these terms or questions are covered in it. It is important, however, that you don’t ‘keyword stuff’ your content – search engines don’t like this and will penalise you for it!

H1 and H2 Tags

It is important that, when you publish SEO copy, you use H1 and H2 tags to help your content to be organised. H1 tags are like the title of a book, and H2 tags are used to break up the content like subtitles. They can help to organise content and ensure that searchers can find what they are looking for quickly and easily – and this is always beneficial in terms of SEO.

You should have just one H1 tag per page and use H2 tags sparingly whilst being as descriptive as possible.

Your Pages

There are several different ways that you can work on your SEO content. You should first ensure that your website is properly optimised. This means making sure that you have up-to-date information, properly optimised product pages, a good ‘about’ page, and a blog section.

Once these pages are fully optimised, you can then go on to think about blog content. The golden rule here is to make your content interesting, informative, entertaining, or authoritative (or preferably all of them!). Some blog ideas include:

• Articles
• Interviews
• Lists
• Guides
• Videos
• Infographics

E-A-T for Good SEO

When it comes to creating the best content for SEO, you should try to comply with the E-A-T rules.

E-A-T stands for:

Expertise – You need to show that you are an expert in your field. You need to show that you know what you are talking about, and this is especially important for professional businesses as opposed to gossip or celebrity websites, for example.

Authoritative – You can use your expertise (or the expertise of your writer) to show that you are an authority in your area. From this, you will become the go-to person for your readers (and potential customers).

Trustworthy – You should make your readers feel that they can trust you – especially if you are hoping that they buy from you! Keep your website strong and clear, informative and secure.

Old Content

Re-purposing your old content is a great way to freshen up your website and help with SEO. You can update any out-of-date information, helping with SEO and making it more attractive to searchers. We also know that Google loves new content – even if it is just re-purposed old content! This also gives you the chance to correct spelling or grammatical errors, fix technical issues like broken backlinks – and add new ones, add other media, and add new keywords.

In this time when your other workload might be low, it is the ideal moment to get your website content perfect, to ensure that it is working efficiently for your business through SEO. By incorporating these fundamentals, you can ensure that you are ready to go again as soon as you need to.