Ranking Locally: Your Guide to GMB & SEO (Unknown Secrets Revealed!) Ep. 580
Are you struggling to rank for local search terms? Have you ever wondered if creating separate local landing pages for various locations could be the…
AI Search
Paving the Path Forward with SEO: Preparing for New Normalities by Lemuel Park #487
SEO is mission critical during and after COVID-19 because organic search captures over 53% of website traffic, provides real-time consumer behavior insights, and keeps delivering value even when paid ad budgets are cut.
Key takeaways
- Over 53% of website traffic comes from organic search, making SEO the highest-ROI channel when paid ads are paused.
- 88% of the customer journey happens online before a prospect ever calls a business, so upstream digital presence matters most.
- Moving a slow commercial website to cloud hosting can get load time under two seconds, which Google rewards with better rankings.
- Real-time SEO data reveals shifting consumer habits and new keyword opportunities created by COVID-19 behavior changes.
- When companies cut paid ads, earned SEO rankings continue paying dividends, acting as durable digital real estate.
SEO in particular is critical not only for discovery, but as the channel that provides the greatest insights into consumer behavior in real time.
About this episode
Paving the Path Forward with SEO: Preparing for New NormalitiesEven prior to COVID-19, organizations were struggling to keep pace with rapidly evolving consumer behavior. Now, digital marketers, even as they adapt to their own work-from-home and isolation strategies, are having to rethink their digital marketing channels and ROI forecasts. Here are six ways to leverage SEO in preparing for new normalities.
Questions this episode answers
Why is SEO considered mission critical during COVID-19?
The article by Lemuel Park argues that SEO reaches consumers at the moment of need regardless of their state of mind, accounts for over 53% of website traffic, and provides real-time insights into rapidly shifting buyer behavior, making it the most agile and affordable channel during disruption.
What should businesses do to their website to improve SEO performance right now?
The hosts recommend auditing site health, fixing page titles and H1 tags, and prioritizing page load speed by moving to cloud hosting. Google rewards pages that load under two seconds, reducing bounce rate and improving rankings, which they call one of the easiest and most impactful SEO moves available.
How does SEO help when a business cuts its paid advertising budget?
Unlike paid ads that disappear the moment spending stops, SEO rankings are earned over time and continue generating traffic and leads even after budgets are cut. Matt Bertram describes organic search visibility as real estate that holds and pays dividends when paid channels go dark.
What are Google E-A-T guidelines and why do they matter for SEO content?
E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. Google confirmed it uses these factors to rate pages within its algorithm. Content that demonstrates these qualities ranks better, while pages that fail to provide genuine value for a given search query are unlikely to rank at all.
In their words
If you have to cut spending, you turn off the ads, everything is gone, right? You're kind of running that space, SEO, you kind of earn it or you kind of have some real estate that will hold and it will start to pay dividends.
Matt Bertram
The rate of change will actually never be slower than it is today.
Chris Burrus
Terms defined in this episode
- E-A-T
- Google's framework of Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness used to rate page quality within its ranking algorithm, confirmed by Google in February and August of the prior year.
- Share of Voice
- A measure of how prominently a brand appears in search results relative to competitors, used to benchmark competitive position and identify opportunities to capture market share.
- First Mover Advantage
- The benefit gained by brands that proactively optimize for emerging search trends during disruption, allowing them to dominate search visibility and recover faster than slower competitors.
- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
- The process of improving a landing page or website so that a higher percentage of visitors take a desired action, referenced as part of the broader set of services clients expect when they ask for SEO.
Full transcript is being added.
This episode answers
Matthew Bertram
AI keynote speaker · Owner & CEO, EWR Digital · President, ModalPoint
Matthew Bertram is an AI keynote speaker, creator of DIG™ (Digital Information Governance), and owner and CEO of EWR Digital. He helps energy and industrial leaders win visibility in AI search (GEO and AEO), is President of ModalPoint and CMO of the Oil & Gas Global Network, hosts The Best SEO Podcast, and has authored eight books including LLM Visibility. More about Matthew Bertram.
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