This article is a service announcement, not a promotional article.  I want to help you keep people who are forced to work from home employed and adding value to your business.  This is a comprehensive guide to how to do that and how it will impact your future profits and how quickly your business comes back from any downturn.

If you are an employee working from home, and you have less than normal to do, send this to your boss so they can decide if this is something you can do for them to continue getting an income.

Guide to Quarantined Employee SEO Work

At the time I am writing this, many people in office jobs are being quickly moved to working from home because of coronavirus in an attempt to slow it’s spread.  Some businesses are busier, and some are maintaining their workload, but many businesses are contracting or laying people off.  The danger of this is that if you have good employees, later they may not come back to work for you or they may find another job.

So I am writing this guide to help you, and them, do things at home that will promote your business in the future and boost your SEO – Search Engine Optimization – so that your business can come back stronger than ever.

Reason Business Owners Should Invest in SEO With Remote Workers 

One, if you can get more value out of people who cannot come into work, you can justify keeping them on the payroll and ready to come back to work when the time is right. 

Two, SEO is the best ROI of any marketing most businesses can do. Utilizing downtime to create content can boost your SEO in a big way.  Plus, articles on your website continue to produce results for years.  It is an investment in your future.

Three, your competition might be doing this as well.  If you have enjoyed high ranking in the past, you might find that some of your competitors are using this strategy of boosting SEO during work at home and you will suddenly find yourself behind them, or knocked off the first page.

Four, you are helping your team by giving them something meaningful to do from home as well as helping the community by keeping people employed.

SEO Activities Anyone Can Do from Home

  1. Article Writing – Even non-writers can write about what your business does and how it helps people.  Have each article focus on a key phrase that is something your potential customer would search on.  For example, if you are a dentist and your hygienists are not working full time, they could write articles like “How to numb a toothache” or “Is a sore tongue dangerous?”
  2. Article Editing – If someone has editing skills, they can review and edit articles written by other employees who are writing articles.  They should identify the key phrase and make sure it is used in the title as well as once per 100 words roughly.  Also using the keyword phrase in the first sentence is helpful.
  3. Video Production – YouTube is the second most popular search engine and producing short, informational videos answering FAQ’s for the business will boost your visibility.
  4. Social Posts – Not into writing? Doing short image and social posts also help grow your traffic.
  5. Testimonial Outreach – Access past customer’s emails or phone numbers and follow up.  Check in on them and solicit testimonials if they are happy with the job you did.
  6. Backlink outreach – Research and contact popular websites and do backlink outreach.
  7. Website Rewrite – Having people take pages that do not have at least 600 words on them and adding some text, such as a story or example, will boost the performance of pages that are currently probably underperforming.  Just be sure to not mess with pages that are performing well. 
  8. Write Authority Content over 2,000 words that go into more detail about a topic.

In a normal time, I would prefer these things be done by people with experience doing SEO.  However, adding additional new good-quality content is good regardless of whether you are paying someone else to do SEO.  It does not have to be one or the other.  The fact is, higher volume content will produce more leads and sales and free traffic in the future.  This is a great way to get value from people forced to work from home and having a lower amount of work to do.

Are You Busy?  Hire Writers To Work From Home

If your company is one of those that is very busy during this time, it is a great time to help people out who might not be so lucky.  Hire writers to write for your website from home.  Give them keyword phrases and article ideas, ask them to research them and write articles for you.  This helps the economy by getting money to people who might be laid off and helps your future traffic and sales.

How Much Should You Pay?

On the low end, you can pay a few dollars per 100 words.  So, a 400 word article might pay $10 for example.  Experienced writers, or if people need to spend more time researching, get paid a lot more.  I know professional writers who charge thousands of dollars for one article.  There is a big scale here and the range of what you pay should be aligned with your budget and goals.  Keep in mind, having a high-quality longer article will make your website more of an authority website and get it to rank better. 

Hire Local When Possible

While I am usually a fan of having a worldwide workforce, if you have a business in a local community the best thing you can do is support people in that community.  Maybe they will not be professional writers, but many people can put together good, very authentic articles and just having an Editor with SEO experience look it over, it can be a top driver of new traffic in the future.

This puts local people to work, when their job might be on hold or lost due to local issues.  This might be a good way to not laying off an employee, or it might be a good way to help people make some money while they look for a job.

Content Ideas For Employees Who Don’t Usually Write

To begin with, if you give these non-writers a formula it will make it much easier to write a useful article.  When I work with clients, I usually tell them just to follow this blog post writing formula.

  • What is a problem your potential customer might be researching?
  • Write an article defining the problem, and then having 1-2 paragraphs on each bullet point that addresses the problem, then sum it up and do a call to action.
    • Introduction that clearly says benefit of reading the article
    • 3-5 points, in their own paragraph
    • Sum it up and what are next steps?

Industry-Specific Article Ideas

Restaurants – Write about recipes, but don’t give away secrets.  The harder the recipe the better.  So, if your restaurant serves meat that is smoked all day, let them know how to do it and any short cut they could do at home.  What makes this nice, is that someone who is reading it will really appreciate the care and difficulty of what goes into your restaurant food.  Also, drink recipes are easy to produce and then you do not need to worry that people will stop coming to your restaurant just because they know how to make a drink themselves.

Hotel – Writing about things to do around your hotel will and always linking back to the hotel as a place to stay will make it more likely that people find your hotel when they are researching things to do in your area.

Sports & Events – If you are part of sports or event industry and you are not busy, write about events in the past.  Write about how much fun people have coming to the events.  What kinds of things do they do before and after the events? 

Retail – If you are in retail and need some ideas, try writing about how to use items that can normally be purchased in your store.  For example, assembling an outfit for under $50 or improving home storage with xyz products.  All of these kinds of articles, linked back to things you sell, will help SEO and help people envision how to use things they buy from you.

Construction – This area is full of article opportunities.  You can write DIY stuff.  You can write about what people should not do themselves.  You can write about things you have seen that were terrible or dangerous and your company helped fix.  You can write about how getting things fixed, refinished or upgraded will add value to a home.  Lots of opportunities here if you

Fitness / Gyms – This one is also very easy.  You can write about weight loss, muscle gain, exercises when you are at home or traveling, and diets to follow to improve results.  Also, if you have shoulder pain or any other slight injury, what should you do?  What can cause it and when do you decide to see a doctor?  Of course, you do not want to start giving medical advice, but when you word it carefully, it can be a good article for SEO and to help your gym members.

Barber / Stylist – At a time when it is difficult to go out and get a haircut, you could write about cutting your kid’s hair at home.  You can also write about products, hairstyles, beauty tips and you could write about a day out, which might include a stop at your salon as well as lunch at a nearby restaurant and shopping in some local stores.

Google and SEO

So there are some fundamental things to get your business website to perform well, and if you are experiencing a slowdown, it is a great time to invest in things that will boost ranking because as things pick back up, people will be searching for things to do.

Your site will perform better when:

  • You publish new, fresh content
  • People share and link to your content
  • You have active social media accounts and they are linked to your website
  • You publish articles that are authority pieces, over 2,000 words long (consider combining a couple of articles to make one authority article)
  • You use different keyword phrases related to your industry in different articles
  • People spend time reading multiple pages on your website when they visit

This is a simplified version of what an SEO company would normally do for you.  But if you have employees who need something to do because business is slow or because you might need to lay them off but you do not want to, then doing articles, images and social media posts for the company can help build a great value for the future, when things pick up and people are out looking for something to do again.

What kind of value does this product?

The last thing I want to cover is the value this produces.  Years ago, SEO was easy and all the rage.  As things got more competitive, more people started paying for clicks from Google and Facebook.  Now, those sources have become much more expensive and less reliable (especially Facebook) and people are reconsidering their investment in search engine optimization.  While you might not rank nationally for a keyword anymore, it is definitely possible to rank locally with a little effort. 

Pay Per Click is often a couple of dollars a click, and in some industries, it is hundreds of dollars a click.  If you invest a little bit of time and money each month into your website, your free organic traffic can be the best Return on Investment for your business.  After all, people who are searching are often people looking to buy. 

If you need help with your SEO strategy, contact Buzzoodle today.  We can do full SEO for you, or simply help you put together a plan to have your employees produce more rich content to help your business grow in the future.