9 SEO Strategies to Work On In Your Slow Season
Summertime can be a slower period in the B2B world as many people take vacations, shift priorities, and tighten budgets. That’s also why summer is often the best time to look at long-term sustainable marketing efforts like SEO. Ahrefs says it can take 3 to 6 months for SEO to show results, so it’s a good area in which to devote your attention if you’ve scaled back other efforts.
In addition to often being a more cost-effective marketing tool than paid search advertising alone, the results you get are more sustainable in the long run. When you stop running a paid campaign, your audience can dry up. But when you’re consistently search-optimizing your site and creating quality content that helps generate backlinks, these long-term improvements can lead to a steady stream of organic traffic, leads, and conversions, regardless of temporary slowdowns.
Here are 9 SEO strategies you should definitely be working on if you’re in your slow season.
#1 Keyword Research
Conduct thorough keyword research to identify the terms and phrases your target audience is using to search for products or services related to your business. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Moz, or Ahrefs to discover relevant keywords with a balance of search volume and competition.
Start with simpler keywords with a lower difficulty level. You can also work on ranking for more long-tail keywords with an FAQ section. Explore topics in your field and look at the questions section in search results to see what questions people might be asking about them.
#2 On-Page Optimization
Optimizing your on-page content makes it friendlier to both human users and search engines. This includes optimizing page titles, meta descriptions, headings, URL structures, and incorporating relevant keywords naturally throughout your content. Start with your main pages and cornerstone content and work your way down from there.
#3 Publish High-Quality Content
Create original, informative, and valuable content that satisfies the search intent of your target audience. Develop a content strategy that includes blog posts, articles, guides, videos, or infographics. Focus on delivering content that answers questions, solves problems, and provides unique insights for your industry. You can use the keyword research you’ve done to help you come up with ideas for content. The content-gap analysis is also a good research tool because it lets you know the terms your competitors are ranking for that you are not.
#4 Link Building
Earn high-quality backlinks from reputable and relevant websites that have an equivalent or greater page authority than yours, and a strong backlink profile is essential for good SEO. Whenever you publish that high-quality content, make sure you’re sharing it with your industry’s influencers and business partners. You can also share guest posting opportunities and collaborations. (We’ll get to social media as well!)
Internal linking also helps boost page authority, so when you’re doing your on-page optimization, look for opportunities to link to other internal pages, and don’t forget to do routine checks for dead backlinks to make sure any links are pointing to a working page.
#5 User Experience (UX)
Providing your users with a delightful experience leads to longer visits and lower bounce rates, which can also improve search rankings. Additionally, you can use a free tool like Google PageSpeed Insights to check your site speed and security for both desktop and mobile devices to make sure you’re providing your users with a fast, secure, and friendly experience.
#6 Technical SEO
In addition to being user-friendly, you also want your site to be machine-friendly. Technical SEO helps improve your site’s ability to be crawled by search engines. This includes optimizing your robots.txt file and XML sitemap, ensuring proper canonical site structure, and implementing structured data. Ahrefs has a terrific beginner’s guide to technical SEO.
#7 Local SEO
If your business operates in specific locations, optimize for local search. Create and optimize your Google Business Profile, maintain consistent business information (name, address, phone number, website, and hours of operation across directories), and encourage customer reviews. Local SEO helps improve your visibility in local search results. You can even incorporate a little SEO into your responses to customer reviews– just don’t overdo it. The response should sound human and genuine first and foremost, but if you can sprinkle a keyword or two in there as well, all the better!
#8 Don’t Forget About Social Media
Use those easy-to-rank terms and FAQs in your social media posts. After you’ve made a list of focus keywords and pages, you can easily build them into your social media calendar to make sure you’re hitting your target terms and pages.
#9 Keep Up the Good Work
Regularly monitor and analyze your website's performance using keyword tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, and Keyword Difficulty Checker, or enlist the help of an experienced SEO agency. This data will provide insights into areas in need of improvement and help optimize and refine your SEO strategies over time. If you’re ready to take your SEO efforts to the next level, or just need advice on how to get started, talk to BoxCrush. We provide expert Indianapolis SEO solutions including technical support, local listing management, content writing, analytics and reporting, and more. Call 317-816-9353 or use the form below to send us a message.