As the curtains draw close on 2016, we’re left with a fortnight post Christmas when most small businesses close shop and kick back.

However, this break presents an incredible opportunity to capitalize on “mass psychology” by implementing simple SEO strategies to make serious gains in your online rankings in 2017.

We’ll stick to 4 easy to implement steps which any business owner can accomplish with relative ease.

Content Creation.

The first and most important step is Content Creation.

Start off with a simple re-cap on how 2016 year has been with events such as highlights, challenges, case studies, product or service evolutions and additions, client testimonials, updates to terms of service , new team member introductions or upcoming product or service launches for 2017.

To boost reader engagement, I recommend breaking down subject matter expert topics and with interesting POV such as hacks, tips, tricks or what to avoid (for instance “5 tips to avoid renovation blowouts” or “5 ways to add massive value to your next renovation within a $5000 budget”.

Expert tip 1 – Plan and delegate topics with your team, and explain the purpose of this exercise, incentivize if necessary!). The greater amount of high quality content you can produce in this break, the better the results – remember, your competitors is unlikely creating or publishing any creating so you want to capitalize on it).

Another upside of getting team collaboration is that you get variety and more readership as your team share their posts with friends and family on Social (read more about the impact of social signals on rankings).

Expert tip 2 – Schedule your content for regular daily distribution and create some excitement around it by incentivizing (most likes get $100 bonus for instance).

Create and Optimise your Social Profile

Secondly, we recommend setting up and  fine-tuning your Google Profiles – Local Business Listings, Blogs, Linked In, Social Profiles and accounts and to optimise your sales funnel.

Link all of the above so that it creates greater cross platform engagement and lead capture. Having a strong presence on multiple platforms creates brand authority and credibility.

I strongly recommend using content distribution platforms such as Scoop.it to maximize reach and gather audience. If you’re producing high quality and interesting content, you can pickup followers quickly across all platforms and audience engagement and social signals act as steroids for rankings.

Optimise pages on your website

This falls in the catergory of on-page SEO (search engine optimisation). We explain more about search engine optimisation (SEO) in Auckland in our previous post.

If you know how to work on your own site, optimise each page by adding fresh content with carefully planned keyword usage and placement. It is critical to understand buyer or search behaviour to target relevant keywords. The trick is to diversify and use both long and short tail keywords and match it with Meta Tags and Meta Descriptions.

For more advance tips on on-page optimisation, check out our previous post on schema markup and https.

Add in lead capture forms on each page for conversation rate optimisation (CRO), sprinkle it with customer testimonials on each page and add in social widgets (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc) to turn your static website into Web 2.0.

Static websites are the equivalent of Yellow Pages (print edition!) – it just doesn’t work anymore.

Cherry on the cake – Invite Customers to Review Your Business

For the bold, go the extra mile and send personalized messages to your valued clients or get some distribution help with Mailchimp (they offer 30 day trials and very easy to work with, even for beginners).

Link to your Google Business Listings and ask for reviews.

Care and attention needs to be paid when sending invites to ensure you target clients who are going to post glowing reviews. Again, you could incentivize this ($100 Give Voucher to be won).

To Sum it Up

A bit of discipline and a couple of hours of commitment daily will be the best investment you could put into your business for 2017 to guarantee you’re off to a head start when it comes to online domination.

Check out this article posted a few weeks by our team for more effective SEO techniques to implement in 2017.
Trust the process or call the Digital Squad on 0800 111 246 to arrange a free one-on-one strategy session valued at $499 where our digital strategists break it down in plain and easy to understand language.

We’ll demonstrate real case studies with proofs on how effective our strategies really are.

The post Crush your competition in 2017 with these simple steps over the holidays. appeared first on Digital Squad.