Helpful Advice for Small Businesses That Are Suffering
The Coronavirus has impacted nearly every area of business, very likely including your website’s search rankings. As the world changed drastically, search traffic did too as they prioritized COVID-related content across websites.
It’s not too early to begin planning how you can recover your search rankings even as disruptions continue into the foreseeable future.
In this article, we’ve outlined four areas that can help you improve your ranking moving forward.
Schema
Schemas help add information to your website that is invisible to visitors but visible, and helpful, to search engines. This structured data markup helps search engines better understand the context of a web page, rather than just displaying results based on keyword usage. The search engine’s web crawlers gather information from your website’s schemas, which in turn can improve your rank, impressions, and traffic by 20 to 30%.
There is also a schema COVID-specific announcements and events, which can help Google better understand your website’s intent to match it with users’ intent while searching.
Deploying schemas to your website can be complex. We always recommend delegating this task to a developer to ensure the update performs as expected.
Local SEO
Local SEO includes both content on your website focused on your city and your Google My Business listing and can significantly increase your visibility for local searches. If your business has a storefront, like a real estate office, medical office, or restaurant, your Google My Business listing helps you get front page results for local searches for your industry.
This is more important than ever right now. Be sure to update your hours and status as needed. If you don’t, Google will crowdsource information and could include false details that negatively impact your business.
Restaurants, for example, can update their business name to include “[Restaurant] – Takeout Available”, and turn off their dining-in option to reflect their area’s restrictions.
AMP Pages
Have you ever seen a lightning bolt icon next to search results? That’s not just an ode to Harry Potter. It shows that the result is an AMP page, which stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. Google launched this in an effort to increase mobile web’s performance back in 2016, and it has been adopted by some publishers and websites, but not all.
AMP pages reduce the number of elements on a page, which can negatively impact user experience. However, it can positively impact your search ranking, making it a worthwhile update to your website.
This is important now because more people are scrolling on their mobile devices due to the lifestyle disruptions the Coronavirus has brought. By improving your website’s loading speed, you can increase the number of people visiting your website.
FAQs & Voice Search
One of the best ways to improve your website’s search ranking without a pandemic happening is by including an FAQs page. These FAQs are often pulled by Google for featured snippets and the dropdown Q&A section aka People Also Asked at the top of search results. By getting this coveted spot in search results you increase the likelihood of users visiting your website.
During COVID-19, though, FAQs take on a new role. Update your FAQs to include information about shipping times, office or store hours, delays, and any other answers your potential customers may be seeking out.
Voice search is a growing segment of SEO and marketing, and uses your FAQs to answer user questions. Be sure to create updated actions and skills for both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant to ensure your content has a higher chance of being heard.
While COVID-19’s impact on businesses will be felt for some time, there are ways that you can begin to help your business. Your search engine ranking is one of them. Improve yours now with these four facets of SEO, including schema markups, local SEO, AMP pages, and FAQs and voice search.
In Need of Talking To a Marketer Who Can Help?
At Forward Push, we believe that we’ll get through this together. If you’re looking for a marketing team to help your business regain its search ranking, let’s chat. Give us a call at (415) 640-8009 or send us a message.
