5 things to be doing during the quiet times to stay useful and relevant

I daren’t utter the dreaded C word that has taken over all of our lives these past couple of weeks, but taken over it has.

Gyms? Closed. Pubs? Closed. Businesses significantly winding down operations and entering survival mode. Workings parents now home-schooling their children. Right now, the world as we know it is a pretty strange and uncertain place.

One thing we do know is that this is only temporary.

This virus won’t be out of control forever, things will improve and the world will return once more, perhaps with a few well-needed changes – more true recognition for the NHS and its staff, public sector workers, teachers, supermarket workers and all those other ‘low-skilled’ roles deemed so unimportant just a few weeks ago. I think a lot of people have already recognised how important gyms and other health facilities are. Here’s hoping to positive change when this is over.

Using your time wisely

As a business-owner, manager or self-employed grafter, one thing you need to do is use this time wisely. Of course, you will have other priorities on-going in your life, especially if you have children or are living with a key-worker, but if you’re not going into work everyday and have more time on your hands than usual, put it to good use.

Do not batten down the hatches completely as now is not the time to stop marketing. Silence will be a big downfall for a lot of businesses. If you stop all outbound communications now, what are people going to think? Largely that you’re done with. The physical business world may have been put on hold for now but the online world is busier than ever.   

It’s true that people may not be spending on non-essentials right now. Let’s accept this and not try and force things. What people are doing is considering and biding their time. It’s more important than ever to speak to your audience, build up a base and provide useful, quality content, because when it’s business as usual, the floodgates are going to open and there’ll be a whole lot of competition. At the minute, people are highly receptive to information and education. Now’s the time for a good marketing.

Here are five marketing tips you can be working on now

1.       Blogging

With vlogging very much the marketing word of 2019, you may think good old blogging is a thing of the past. Do not be fooled by this, blogging is going nowhere. In fact, it’s the cornerstone of pretty much all internet content. An evergreen marketing pathway if you will. Voice search requires written content as a basis to provide the answer and many videos are also founded on the premise of the written word. Google reads text to derive the meaning and uses search, technical and behaviour algorithms (clicks, time on page, bounce rate etc) as a measure of how useful that content is.

Yes a lot of things may already have been written about in your field, but things change all the time and there’s always new science and new information reaching the surface. Find it and right about it. The crucial aspect of blogging is to provide useful, educational or interesting content. Use it with a purpose and watch your audience grow. If you are going to write about a topic with plenty of content, make yours bigger, better and more informative.

2.       Create long-form content

This may take the form of website blogging as mentioned above or another form of written content, such as an e-book, downloadable PDF or perhaps some kind of paid-for course. All of this is high value content and takes time to create.

Long-form content is great and seen favourably by search engines. In short, long-form content ranks better in Google.

At the back end of 2016 Backlinko found the average word count of the page occupying number one spot in Google to be 1,890 words. In 2019, Backlinko’s content study found that long-form content over 3000 words gets considerably more backlinks than shorter content. And it’s backlinks that elevate authority, which leads to better Google rankings. An Ahrefs study from 2018 found the ‘true’ median length of a top-performing article to be at least 800 words.

With a bit more time to play with, now could be the perfect moment to create highly informative, in-depth pieces that will rank better in Google.  

3.       SEO

Search engine optimisation is often not at the top of fast-moving businesses who are at full-tilt on delivering now. The reason why? It takes ‘too’ long to see results and the skill involved requires someone in the know.

Partly true. It’s not a quick win. But what successful business is built on quick wins?

SEO does take a couple of months to truly kick in and see proper results by way of clicks, traffic and action but once you hit this point there’s no turning back. The quick wins that some businesses prefer such as PPC, paid ads and influencer marketing only go as far as the bottom of your money pot.

What do you get when you turn the money off? That’s right, piss all. You go back into oblivion until you put the next lot of money in the pot. Don’t get me wrong, PPC and influencer marketing do have a place and can really help to get initial traction in the market but unless you have an unlimited budget, it’s not completely sustainable.

SEO is not like this. It’s a sustainable, organic strategy. It’s not a quick win, it’s a long-term win. The good business brains amongst you should value long-term success over short-term triumphs. It’s not to say don’t utilise the short-term avenues, but they need to be integrated into long-term thinking for the future.  

Now is a superb time to get your website optimised for google search. That’s your homepage, main navigation pages, landing pages and keyword focussed blog content. Read up on SEO and put the actions into place. If you can’t get your head around it, drop me a message and we can work something out. You’ll be incredibly happy you did once your business is up to full speed again a few months down the line and your traffic is streaming in organically with no additional spend.

4.       Email marketing

Email is a great way of communicating directly to your audience. This isn’t a new-found pearl of wisdom, but the truth still holds in 2020. Many business owners shy away from email as it can be seen as a bit spammy and a bit annoying. It also seems quite a personal way of contacting someone. And it is, or at least is should be.

Write an email to your audience as if you were writing to just one person on that list. Personal emails are so much more effective than generic, bulk sales messages. You want people to look forward to your emails, what you’ve got to say and what you’ve got to show them, and this only happens when you communicate effectively. A person on your list who isn’t receptive and not bothered will unsubscribe. And that’s fine. This way you get a core audience who are interested in what you’ve got to say and who you know are potential customers. 

5.       Social media profiles

Let’s be honest, a lot of business social media profiles can be quite dry. Rather than a communications and engagement tool, social media is often used as an extended advertisement platform shouting about boring offers and giving uninteresting updates. Look back at your messages and see what you’ve been posting. If it’s all boring sales pitches, then you’re doing it wrong.

Social media is your place to show a bit of personality and engage directly with your audience (yes, do respond to people). Although it is useful to post offers and other necessary updates on there, these need to be intermingled with useful content, informative updates and entertaining posts. Basically non-sales things. The 80:20 ratio is a good rule of thumb. 80% useful/entertaining content to 20% directly promoting your business.

This is the way to build an audience and build trust. If you’re pushing sales all the time, you’re not going to build trust as people will see you are in the social media game for one thing. It won’t work. The sales will come later.

Now’s a great time to put an information, engagement and entertainment action plan into play. These three points are in the mission statement of the BBC, and you won’t go far wrong if you adopt this tactic on social. Focus on providing useful content, especially during this largely non-buying phase we’re in.

This is not to say go mad and start posting 5 times a day. Not needed and probably not useful. Quality is key. If it’s one post a day, or one post a week, get it started and keep it ticking over. You also don’t need to focus on every social media platform, choose 1 or 2 and put your efforts into this. Make it sustainable so you can keep it up when you get busy again.

The overarching message here is stay relevant and visible during these quiet times. Just because we’re all isolating doesn’t mean you should isolate your business and stop in your tracks until all this is over. Other priorities may take precedent at this very moment, but make sure you don’t stop completely. This will only make it harder once things do pick up again. Use this time wisely and don’t stop talking about your business and the usefulness that you provide.

What does Google’s new BERT update mean for your website content?

Panic stations – Google has released a new algorithm update!

Well, let me enlighten you early doors. If you’ve got good quality content on your site, you needn’t worry.

If you know your content’s a bit rushed, ropey in places and generally not up to scratch, you’ll probably want to get it updated and improved. If you’ve actively tried to out-Google Google, then maybe it’s about time to change tact. 

Here’s my second enlightenment: this really isn’t anything new. Google’s focus on ‘high quality’ content has been the case for a while. This new algorithm update just highlights the importance further.

What’s high quality content I hear you say?

It’s a number of things but mainly comes down to your words and pages being unique, specific, well-written and giving the reader the information they want. 

So, back to the update. Being honest, that’s the most important information you need to know. However, leaving it there would be slightly remiss of me, so let me explain a little further for those of you who’ve made it this far.

Google and it’s algorithms

Google updates and tweaks its algorithms. All. The. Time. But now and again they release an update that does have the potential to cause a major impact in the organic search world.  

Enlightenment 3: some people with a bit of SEO intellect will perhaps try and bamboozle those in the shadows with their ‘google algorithm’ knowledge.

“You better watch out for the Panda and Hummingbird Google update or your site might be penalised and banned from the indexed. Forever.”

Or some other bafflement.

The truth is, the majority of Google algorithm updates aim to make the search engine a better place for the user. Better experience equals more users for Google. Sometimes they do this by rewarding those sticking to the rules, sometimes they do it by penalising the bad guys. For example:

• Those who’ve been ‘over-optimising’ websites (keyword stuffing, unnatural links etc) > Penguin update

• Those who with quality issues and too many ads > Quality update

• Those with low value content that goes against webmaster guidelines > ‘Fred’ update

• Those content farm type websites > Panda update

The website owners who run good, unique, content-rich sites who haven’t been looking for quick wins or cutting corners along the way needn’t worry about most of the updates as their sites are not the focus of the Google gods trying to clean up their house.

Alas, we get to the BERT Google update, which as you’ve probably guessed from the tone, is a little different. This update will actually affect one in 10 searches in US English and will be rolled out to all locales shortly.

What is the Google BERT Update?

In the most basic terms, it’s a language model. It’s all about Google trying to understand the context of a search query. I won’t tell you what BERT means as it won’t mean anything to you*.

We know how nuanced the English language can be, and how one little word can make a huge difference to the whole context of a phrase or question. Even just where that word appears in the phrase can change the meaning completely. And it’s this alongside more conversational language which Google is aiming to better understand. The better Google understands context, the better the search results they’ll be able to provide.

From the Google press release:

“With the latest advancements from our research team in the science of language understanding–made possible by machine learning–we’re making a significant improvement to how we understand queries, representing the biggest leap forward in the past five years, and one of the biggest leaps forward in the history of Search.”

You can read more from the proverbial horse’s mouth over on the Google blog.

An example they give is a search for ‘2019 brazil traveller to usa need a visa’. The word ‘to’ here is crucial to understand the meaning. Previously, the algorithms wouldn't understand the importance of this connection and would return results about US citizens travelling to Brazil. The BERT update allows Google to understand this nuance and provide much more relevant results for this particular query.

What does this update mean for the content on your website?

According to Google’s search spokesman Danny Sullivan, there is nothing specifically to optimise for with BERT. Instead, it’s all about the general quality of your content – written content, images, layout, readability.

If you have poor, unstructured content that’s difficult to understand and not user friendly, you might be negatively affected. It’s never been more relevant to write for humans rather than the Google robots. Old hack techniques like keyword stuffing is no longer a thing. If you’re still trying to get four instances of the same keyword phrase in your text, stop it.

If you’ve suffered a loss in traffic after the update you will want to look at your content and improve your site’s content. You may have lost rankings for irrelevant phrase, which in that case isn’t a bad thing, just that your search visibility was probably misleadingly high.

One thing you might be looking at in the future is expanding the amount of content on your site, be this blog posts or webpages. If you’re wanting to increase this type of content then it might be a good idea to create more specific content.

What the update reinforces is the need for website owners is the need to write for people rather than algorithms. As we’ve seen, algorithms change all the time but people generally don’t. Good quality content transcends the algorithms and will hopefully be favoured by each tweak the search engine makes.

Yes you still need the SEO basics – on-page optimisation, backlinks and technical set up – but it’s no longer possibly to try and trick Google to rank your site higher as it’s far far more advanced that it was even a few years ago.

If you are in the search for top notch written content with the SEO basics packed in, give me a shout.

*Ok, I knew you’d be curious. It means Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. I told you it wouldn’t mean anything to you – me neither!