Six SEO techniques to help your business grow in tough economic times

It is certainly fair to say that the UK economy has been going through a period of trouble. With political turmoil, problems with inflation, and the ongoing fallout from the war in Ukraine, Covid-19 and Brexit, it is not surprising that many businesses have faced significant challenges.

However, something that many companies can do to increase their profitability is to prioritise investing in the online aspects of their business. One main way to ensure that your website is ranking as high as possible on Google is via effective Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Implementing good SEO practices coupled with an overarching understanding of digital marketing techniques will enable you to grow your reach and build on business success at a time when it is needed most.

In this article, we take a look at six of the key SEO techniques that any business can use in tough financial times to make a difference to its bottom line. Every business would love to bring in more leads, increase sales and make more profit, and these techniques provide the opportunity to do via SEO. 

Understand the keywords you want to target

Keywords are a vital part of any successful SEO campaign. Many businesses make the mistake of working to improve their website’s pages without thinking about what they want to rank for. Targeting keywords helps you to properly optimise the pages of your site to rank as high as possible.

It is important to think carefully about the keywords that it is best for your site to rank for. It can be a great idea to look at any data that you currently have on the keywords that perform most effectively for you - what do people search for when they end up converting on your site. If you can get more of this traffic it will be far easier to grow your business. 

Focus on local

One of the most important factors in SEO during tough economic times is focusing on your core audience. For many businesses, this means those people in their local area. It is certainly true for any company that has physical premises. 

The need to focus on local SEO is borne out by the numbers; 30% of all mobile searches are related to location - and what is even more compelling is the fact that 78% of those people who search for something nearby will visit the business within a day of their search. 

“You must be visible in local organic and Map Pack search results if you want to get found,” says Miranda Miller, writing for Search Engine Journal. “Then you have a chance to convert those searchers to in-store traffic, booked appointments, or some other type of paying customer.”

Getting relevant local reviews, ensuring your local listings are accurate, and maintaining a high-quality Google Business Profile are all important ways to improve your local SEO rankings while ensuring that you get the right type of traffic. 

Speed is everything

There can be no doubt page loading speed has become a vital feature of Google’s algorithm in recent years. Google has made this clear when providing information about its major updates. For example, when Google announced its Core Web Vitals update, it made a huge point around an aspect known as the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). 

Officially the LCP measures “the amount of time to render the largest content element visible in the viewport, from when the user requests the URL”. But cutting through the jargon, it measures how fast a page loads. According to the metrics, a website that takes 2.5 seconds or less to load is ideal, but anything that is slower than 4 seconds is poor. 

Attract links with amazing content

Links are one of the most important factors in Google’s algorithm. Getting strong links from powerful sites is one of the most effective ways to boost your website in the search rankings. But if you want to get these links, then you need to do something to earn them. 

“You want strong websites with high levels of organic traffic to link to you, so spend time creating valuable content that is worthy of being linked to,” says Kirsty Schofield, writing for Artemis Marketing. “Finding opportunities to build your mentions and share your expertise can be incredibly effective, and that’s where a strong link building strategy is essential.”

Measure and track what you do

You can’t carry out any analysis on how effective your work is if you aren’t measuring and tracking all of the various aspects of your SEO work. SEO is a long and complicated process and there is no silver bullet that will make a site rank. It is much more a case of trial and error - and as such, you need to be able to track what works and what doesn’t. 

Some of the most important metrics to follow include conversion rate, time on page, bounce rate, and pages per visit. 

Push social media

It is common for businesses to forget about the power of social media to SEO. Google sees engagement with social media channels as an important factor, if only tangentially.

“Your shares across social media sites have no place in SEO rankings,” says Moss Clement, writing for SEMrush. “Still, when more people share your content throughout social media, it generates social signals that indicate your posts are useful to your target market.” 

Continued activity on social media can do wonders for increasing your reach, targeting the right audience and using social media platforms to boost your business.