Utilising Employees to improve SEO
Whether you are a multinational corporation or a small ‘mom and pop’ business, it's important to keep track of search engine rankings. Up to 88% of customers research local business listing before making a purchase either online or in person. So it is critical to leverage everything you have to your advantage.
One asset that employers haven’t been utilising as much as they should be, is seeing the value that their own employees can play in contributing to a company’s search engine rankings. The best SEO strategy for your organisation depends heavily on the type of company and the different ways different employees can help. In general, the following techniques can improve your employees contribution to your organisation’s search engine ranking.
Backlinks
Do your employees have their own professional websites or blogs? This can be a good opportunity to link to your website. If your employees keep proper maintenance of their website than it should have a positive domain authority; allowing for your website to be ranked higher in search ranking.
This is especially true if the subject matter of the website is similar to that of your company. Google looks very favorably upon local backlinks, especially if the business is a local bricks and mortar company. So these local backlinks can significantly help your organisation if you are in local businesses, for example, lawyers, caterers, and construction companies.
Original content
Everyone in your company has something that makes your company special. Why not let that shine on your site? Adding content to your site can have an incredible impact on your search engine performance.
Only about 30% of Google searches are main keywords such as ‘car repair’ and ‘dentist office’. The other 70% of searches are called long tail keywords which would show a searcher researching ‘Car repair near me that specializes in BMW maintenance’.
This is why it’s important to generate a large amount of quality content. Ideally you want a maintenance manager to write about common issues that go on with BMW’s and how that shop can help with their issue.
Additionally, this can give your employees a feeling of being appreciated since they have the ability to express both their point of view from their position in the company as well as give unique pieces of information that you would not have access to, if the responsibility was left to a dedicated writer or content marketer.
Social media shares and comments
Most of your employees are already active on social media sites whether that be Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram. When your company releases original content it would be good to ask your employees to engage with the content improving your SEO rankings on those sites and attracting a larger viewership as a result
It’s important for the content that is being shared to make sense with your employees background and standard posts. For example, if you a law firm and you want your employees to share it on LinkedIn that would be a good platform. But if you wanted the same employees to share the content on Instagram, it might come across as ingenuine if they share a legal article, if your employee uses their Instagram to mainly promote their family bakery.
Encourage customer engagement
This topic pertains primarily toward brick and mortar shops. To give your employee’s incentives to create personal connections with customers, it may be a good idea to offer additional bonuses whenever their name is added to a Google review. This utilises the power that you have from your passionate employees and also uses the strength that you have from customers who have had the best experiences with your establishment.
As stated earlier, a customer is 88% likely to have searched online for your services before stepping foot in a brick and mortar business. It should come across in rviews that the business is full of helpful, caring, and professional employees.
If they look at the reviews of your business and one of the comments reads: "How amazing Rachel was at helping your organise your wedding!" and includes details of how she was able to help you, then another customer is more likely to follow this trend and feel that business is worth investigating further.
The good thing about awarding bonuses based on positive named mentions is that you are primarily paying for positive results. If a bonus for a positive review is $50 but your wedding planning business gains even one customer based off a trend of positive comments, then your company has already made a positive cash flow from that interaction.