Businesses have bounced back (and are booming) after a long period of economic insecurity. For many brands, the last several years have been very uncertain and always changing. With an unstable global climate (and economy), competition for customers reached an all-time high. As brands worldwide are experiencing a large jump in business and conversion – especially after several years of slow sales – companies have become more competitive than ever. As a result, it’s just not as easy to rank as it used to be.
If there’s anything we’ve learned from the uncertainty, it’s critical to set your business up for future success. Optimizing your search engine optimization (SEO) strategies is a great way to future-proof your brand. Strong SEO can prepare and protect your brand for any rough times that lie ahead. Quality SEO also positions your brand for the long run, even if that means a challenging or rocky business environment. It’s a long-term investment – what you do now will continue to perform (and pay off) later.
To stay relevant and competitive, it’s important that businesses to implement some cost-effective SEO measures. Compared to other digital marketing strategies, like paid advertising, SEO is a more affordable alternative.
Before we dive into how you can future-proof your brand with SEO, let’s first gain a better understanding of what goes into a protective strategy.
How to Create Protective SEO
While there are many different ways you can incorporate SEO to future-proof your brand, there are a few things to consider first. For these strategies to function long-term, it will require a bit of planning and some investment. Quality SEO takes time and resources. Put simply, the more effort you put in now, the longer and better your SEO will perform in the future.
One thing to think about when future-proofing with SEO is that Google’s algorithm changes, and so do business insecurities. You’ll need to consider this when optimizing your SEO in order to develop marketing strategies that will continue to perform despite any major external changes.
How to Use SEO to Future-Proof Your Brand
Quality SEO requires optimizing and strengthening your marketing efforts across the board. From creating content to understanding your target audience, developing a strong plan will allow your SEO to continue to perform well into the future.
A key thing to consider is predictive SEO. To develop SEO that will future-proof your brand, it’s important to attempt to predict what will happen in both the near and long-term future relative to your audience’s interests, especially. While this may seem like a shot in the dark, it’s crucial to future-proofing. Here are a few ways you can incorporate predictive SEO to do so.
Create Quality Content
To future-proof your business with predictive SEO, this requires the creation of quality content on topics that will become popular with your target audience in the future.
Usually, brands will wait for a topic to trend and become popularized and then write about it. However, this is a very reactive approach. When it comes to predictive SEO, a more proactive strategy is required. This means your brand needs to attempt to predict what will be trending in the future.
While this may seem like a risky approach, it can have big rewards in terms of ranking, reach, and user engagement. To do this, brainstorm with your team! Consider what your audience may want or need in the future based on past data and research. Some things to ask yourself and asses are:
- How has your content performed in the past?
- How have audiences engaged with your content in the past?
Another important thing to understand is that your SEO strategy for content has to consist of more than simply putting your business in front of an audience. For the best future results, your content needs to connect with target audiences on a deeper level. It’s no longer just about traffic; conversion and retention are key to future success!
So, how do you do this? Your content should be transparent with customers. Don’t be afraid to address the reality of the world and talk about issues affecting daily lives and business (like the pandemic, for example). Creating content that is relevant to the current global climate allows customers to have their questions answered and concerns shared by your brand.
This also applies to trends, as many people will be searching for topics relevant to their lived reality. In order to rank and put your content in front of these audiences, it’s important that your content is relatable to readers’ searches.
Organic Search
One thing to focus on when developing your SEO strategy is organic search. This drives traffic to your site and increases user engagement, ultimately leading customers to purchase. By optimizing your organic search strategy, your business will continue to rank and reach customers with relevant searches.
The best way to optimize your organic search for future success is to develop an in-depth understanding of your target audience’s interests, needs, questions, and concerns. To do this, you will need to assess user behavior (with the help of data analytics) to see how users are interacting with your site’s landing pages, content, and products. This will allow you to understand what exactly your customers are looking for, what on your site has met their needs in the past, and how they have engaged with your brand.
Then, once you have gained a better understanding of what your customers are searching for, you can use this information to develop your organic search strategy (in terms of content and keywords). Marketing customers based on their shared interests and values will support your organic search rankings in the long run.
Stay In-The-Know
Trends come and go in what seems like an instant. Staying on top of search trends and making adaptations to your content and SEO strategy as necessary is an important step to future-proof your brand. This is the best way to stay relevant and rank.
User behavior is always changing, and it is influenced significantly by what’s trending. So, it’s important your SEO strategies adapt to your customers’ search trends. To keep up-to-date with trending topics amongst your target audience(s), social media marketing will be key.
Keywords
To help your brand continue to rank in the long run, it’s important that your keywords will be relevant to users’ searches. To ensure this, generate niche keywords that are relevant to your brand, target audience, and content. In this case, long-tail keywords are your best bet.
While short-tail keywords have a high search volume, they are much more competitive. So, if you use exclusively short-tail keywords, your content will get lost among a sea of competitors. Try to generate keywords that are specific but will still reach audiences. To do this, test which keywords perform best and find what works.
Once you have strong and relevant keywords in place, this will help your content and your site rankings continue to perform in the future.
Internal Links
Internally linking relevant material across your site pages and within your content is another great SEO strategy to future-proof your brand. This technique adds extra value to your site pages and the user experience. Consider embedding links to some of your site’s landing or service pages within your content to drive traffic. This will support user browsing and conversion, as well.
Consult with SEO Specialists
Still need a little support? Consult with the specialists from Zero Gravity Marketing. Our team is well-versed in all things SEO, and our digital marketing services can take your brand to the next level. When it comes to future-proofing, there is no one else you should trust for the highest-performing SEO strategies. Visit our site to learn more about our services, or contact us to discuss working together.
