It is fair to say that 2020 has been a game-changer in every industry, and digital marketing is no exception. Many office buildings, work floors, and other workspaces locked their doors and instructed their employees to set up shop at home. It was an eventuality that no one saw coming – and that many wouldn’t have considered possible before the pandemic. Fortunately, the resourceful and flexible digital industry – as a whole – has managed quite nicely. This isn’t to say, however, that it’s been easy or that there aren’t ways we can continue to stay nimble and to roll with the evolving landscape of the new normal.

Think Content

With the shutdowns, remote learning, and work-from-home initiatives that are shaping our lives and our businesses, it is almost a certainty that your customers and clients (and potential customers and clients) are spending more time online and are doing more of their shopping and business online. This makes right now a great time to think carefully, critically, and creatively about your content.

Be Seen

More consumers are spending more time online than ever before, and you should be taking advantage of this fact by increasing your online visibility. You can help bolster your SERP real estate by optimizing that content that’s already been ranked. Forget about recreating the wheel, and instead, focus on massaging what you’ve already got into something that better coincides with your visitors’ search intentions. All of the following can help:

Make your title tags pop.
Spiff up your H1 efforts.
Don’t forget your metadata.

These are all front-door basics that help set the tone for your overall site – and that help draw visitors in. The goal is to provide your visitors with the information they seek – while inspiring confidence – and the details matter.

Adopt a Holistic Approach

Now that you’ve fine-tuned your hook, it’s time to think about your content overall, and a patchwork of plans isn’t going to bring you the uptick in numbers that you’re looking for. When it comes to content, you should be thinking holistically, which means that the unique voice and personality you’ve worked so hard to capture in your headers, tags, and PAA questions should resonate throughout. Take a good hard look at your content – with an eye for gaps – and proceed with all of the following in mind:

Prioritize those topics that should be addressed as quickly as possible. Let your competitors’ top offerings along with keywords that have the highest ranking-potential be your guide.
Know your recommended posting frequency (relative to your industry) and strive to hit that mark.
Become more familiar with the keywords that matter most to your industry – along with their most closely associated general topics and their broader topic-families – and use this familiarity to help polish your content.
Augment your content with creative visual offerings, including pictures, videos, and infographics, that give your site a bump.
Making keywords work for you is about more than simply sprinkling them liberally throughout your content. In fact, overuse can do as much damage as good. In other words, knowing and following the SEO guidelines (that most closely apply to your goals) is critical.
Content is still king, but the old adage location, location, location remains relevant. The pithy piece you post on social media is unlikely to be well-suited to your website and vice versa.

A digital marketing pro can help you apply all of the above specifically to your online presence and help your efforts blossom in the process.

You Can Work from Home

If you had told most of us who are currently working from home that this would be a thing in 2020, we would have pooh-poohed you. Now, however, a great many of us are in the thick of it, and we didn’t have a lot of time to plan for or adjust to this new reality at the outset. Fortunately, there are a couple of work-from-home hacks – culled from experts in this work environment – that are universally beneficial.

Set Yourself Some Limits

We are going for balance here, and working in the same space where you live tends to blur the lines. Clocking out of your work mindset can be exceptionally difficult when you’re working from home, and because there’s no physical dividing line, many experience “work creep.” Designating a dedicated workspace that you can walk away from at quitting time can make a world of difference. You don’t need a lavish home office to make this happen – a small desk in the corner of your studio apartment can serve the same purpose.

Hey, Take a Break!

Taking a break from work – at home – feels weird. Again, the dividing line is permeable. Powering through your workday without taking a couple of mini-breaks, however, can leave you and your work product depleted. In fact, taking that well-deserved break can help you continue to fire on all cylinders when you get back at it (and rest assured, your work will be waiting for you when your break ends). Taking 15 may be just what you need to find the problem-solving inroads you’ve been searching for.

Come What May: A Digital Marketing Pro Can Help You Master 2021

If nothing else, 2020 has taught us resilience. One of the only nonvariants in 2020 was the continued ascendancy of online business, and the digital marketing pros at The Web Guys have powerful tools and insight to help you secure your space within. Finish the year strong by connecting with or calling us at (317) 805-4933 today.