How to use SEO to grow your business in a COVID world
If your business is trying to learn how to use SEO to generate more sales in the post-COVID world, you’ve come to the right place.
In this interview with SEO director Brendan Hufford, you’ll learn the following:
How to use SEO to generate more leads and sales in this post-pandemic world.
The marketing opportunities every small-business owner should be thinking about right now.
What the future of SEO might look like.
How we used Brendan Hufford’s SEO teachings to rank our client, CMC Sheet Metal, onto the first page of Google for several profitable keyword phrases.
And he even answered the most controversial question of the 1990s: What’s the better video game system, Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis?
More about Brendan Hufford
It’s no exaggeration when I say this: Brendan Hufford is one of the sharpest SEO minds in all of marketing. He’s the director of SEO for a well-respected marketing agency, Directive.
And he’s the founder of SEO For The Rest Of Us, which takes high-level SEO concepts and teaches them in an easy-to-understand format.
Enjoy the audio interview below
And if you’d prefer to read, here is a shortened version of the interview thoughtfully transcribed for clarity
Ouster Marketing: If you were a small business owner trying to approach SEO from scratch right now, how would you go about that?
Brendan Hufford: Let's talk about small businesses, especially small local businesses. I came up working with a lot of wedding photographers, and they've just been crushed right now.
With weddings and events being canceled and rescheduled and everything, part of it is figuring out where that gap is. Where's that open space.
You're going to have to be a little bit predictive of what people are searching for? No keyword tool is going to tell you that people are looking up pandemic photoshoots.
It's not going to show up in the tools for two or three months, and it's going to say the volumes real low, but people are looking for it. They're looking for physically distanced photo shoots.
They're looking for personal brand photography, something I still don't see enough photographers leaning into. Like, you still have skills, and people will need your skills. There are people with money out there.
I focus a lot when I think about SEO on discoverability. When somebody's looking for the things I do or can do, do I have a website or pages on my website that address that thing? So at least I'm in the running to be discoverable.
The biggest thing right now: Either you have a lot of work to do because you're still really successful or you have time, and you can put some time into this.
And if you don't have either, I'm going to say this lovingly, cause I've been there, your business is broken. If you're both broke and working a ton, as a business owner, there are some systems in there you can do better.
Invest in content, invest in figuring out what people need, and understand that pages on your site are meant to push people to the next level of understanding.
SEO is not going to turn into money overnight. If you need money overnight, that’s what paid advertising exists for. It gets you in search engines first, instantly, and you can test.
That's what I love. You can test what works and what doesn't. If the copy doesn't work, it doesn't work. You can experiment with paid, and see the headlines that are crushing in terms of clicks and conversions and sales.
And then just take those headlines and put them on your homepage. There's a lot of opportunities still. I don't think you have to wait.
You can invest now when a lot of people are hurting and be ready to be discoverable when things pick up –– because they will eventually.
Ouster Marketing: What are the biggest SEO mistakes that you see small businesses making right now?
Brendan Hufford: The biggest mistake they make is their content strategy involves using some sort of keyword tool. And then they do an export, and they sort the columns.
They go, “Alright, lowest keyword difficulty, highest search volume, and we're just going to start knocking them out.”
Like, that's cool that the keyword gets 47,000 searches per month. And it looks like you can rank easily because keyword difficulty is a strange metric that doesn't take a lot of things into account.
But now you spent all this time creating this stuff that never turns into business. Whereas if I was going to invest in content, I would look at, you know, my core pages, my service pages. Do these convert? Do I have case studies?
And you know, this sounds silly, but local businesses very often suck at having photos of themselves doing their work. If you're a local business, people want to see where they're going.
If you're a service provider, they want to see who's coming to their home. They want to see you doing your thing. We all know what stock photos look like at this point. Like, have actual photos taken.
See if you can barter with a local photographer. Barter with some people if you have to.
Ouster Marketing: What has been your biggest post-COVID challenge?
Brendan Hufford: I work here. I sleep here. I work out here. I eat dinner over there. Everything happens in a very small space, and there's no real gap.
As a marketer, it is difficult right now because it's hard to focus. There's a lot of opportunities. There's a lot of noise. There's a lot of constraints. It's hard to figure out a direction and commit.
Then in terms of doing the craft of marketing, one of the things that have been most difficult right now is –– and I say this as somebody who goes to therapy –– you end up playing therapist with your clients.
Ouster Marketing: We’re going to say a person, place, or thing. You briefly tell us what comes to mind:
Online Education?
Brendan Hufford: I think everybody has realized that online education is the future. There's no reason to pay so much for college.
I say this as a teacher for 10 years and an assistant principal for two, the societal function of the school is babysitting. So people can work. It's fine. We're realizing there are other options.
The future of SEO?
Brendan Hufford: The future of SEO is multi-platform. It's understanding that there are multiple search engines out there, not just Google.
We're in the middle of antitrust interviews and things in Congress right now, even though I feel like most of those interviews are like them asking Bezos how to plug in their printer or something.
Google can flip the switch whenever it wants. So it's understanding every platform as a search engine, as an answer engine, and understanding how people search.
That's how you win at Amazon. That's how you win at Quora, YouTube, Google, Pinterest. These are all search engines. You can win on all of them if you understand how people search for things.
Ouster Marketing: Brendan Hufford, thanks for the interview. We appreciate your time.