SEO is still relevant in 2020 for small or medium-sized businesses - and in the Transportation and Construction Industry - it’s more relevant than ever. SEO is one of the most potent ways to get long term results from your website. Let’s take a look and see how to do search engine optimization in a way that will benefit your business the most in 2020.
Everyone is connected online through their mobiles, tablets or even desktop computers looking for solutions to their problems. While transport and construction services can’t be offered online, you have to be able to reach your target market online and get them through your door if you want to remain competitive - and SEO is one of the most important tools you have to achieve high ranking search results. The higher your ranking in search results pages, then the higher your chances to get traffic directed to your website. The more traffic that gets to your website, the more likely you are to get new customers and SEO is a very cost-effective way to reach your target market.
SEO Trends for 2020
SEO is a very dynamic field and so are the fields of transportation and construction. SEO now is a lot different from it was a decade ago and the same can be said about the construction and transportation Industries. As we learn more, we change the way we do things and if you want to be at the forefront of the market you will have to stay abreast of the changes. One example of the latest changes in SEO is Google’s new Berth algorithm.
BERT - Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. This algorithm is all about natural language processing. It allows Google to not just identify your keywords but to also understand the meaning of sentences including any present context nuances. It can recognize entities, works with speech tagging and allows for even better optimization for question-answering content.
With the Bert algorithm launch in 2019, experts in the field are now speaking of the importance of optimizing for this specific algorithm. So what does that mean to your business in transport or construction? It means you will now have to reassess the way users searching for your services, target these access points and align your content with what your target market needs.
Other SEO trends for 2020 include;
Creating high quality, optimized niche content
Your E.A.T - Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness for your niche
User Experience - Making your SEO less technical
Mobile SEO - your website and your SEO should be compatible with mobile because that is where more of your potential customers are accessing information from Structured data - creating links within a page, alongside other pages on your website, etc
Optimizing for Google’s Knowledge Graph
Brand building
Link Building - Linking back to your website outside of your website
Focusing on Visibility - Brand marketing on Google and not just on your website
How to Make these SEO Trends Work For You
Step #1: Find an “Opportunity Keyword” - Go beyond choosing a keyword that you think is relevant to your industry. Simply using “transport in X city” will not be enough if there is a lot of competition in your city. Do some research and find out what else your customers are searching for as it relates to your industry and apply those to your keyword list. For example, you may cater to a specific segment of the construction industry as a general contractor, civil engineering contractor or specialty trade contractor and offer unique services, equipment or skills within those sectors - those would be the unique keyword opportunities that your competitors may not be utilizing
Step #2: Analyze Google’s First Page - Once you have built your keyword or keyword phrases you now want to look at your competitors. What do you find when you search for your keywords? Who are your largest competitors and what do they offer that you don’t and vice versa. The information you garner here will help you in the next step.
Step #3: Create Something Different and better - To stand out from the competition who may have been in business longer, have equipment or fleet advantages or even more funding than you, you will have to make your offerings better or more unique. Customers have hundreds of potential options to choose from when looking for a transportation or construction solution to their needs - and typically, they will not look past the first few search results in making a buying decision - making SEO is a great, cost-effective way to take a different approach to market your business.
Step #4: Add a Hook - You want to get your reader’s attention from the very first line. Create a hook for each piece of content and place this on your website’s meta description. This way people searching for your keywords, your services or your products will see that you have the solution they are seeking even before visiting your website.
Step #5: Optimize For On-Page SEO - Take every possible measure you can directly on your website. Make sure you are choosing white hat techniques, techniques that won’t get you flagged. You only want to use methods that will benefit you positively and for the long term. These techniques are considered ethical SEO and give you long term success. Some examples include link building, keyword analysis, backlinking and the creation of content that makes sense for human readers and not just for google’s bots.
Step #6: Optimize For User Intent - Search engines are looking beyond typical rankings in 2020. SEO is more than your keywords, metatags, and titles, etc. Your content must match the intent of your business, no matter what your keywords are or how well you wrote your title you can still get pushed down the list if your website is doesn’t match both your keywords and the intent of the google search that brought your potential customer to your website.
Step #7: Make Your Content Look Awesome - Your content can be packed with information and with the right user intent but still not get viewed. Break up content into smaller paragraphs that are easier to skim and include pictures and video whenever possible to help break up the text as well. Visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text and both images and videos are viewed more often than text-only based content.
Step #8: Build Links to Your Page - Create links back to your page/s. Some people need your transport services but may not be using the keywords associated with your business. When you link back to your page from various related blogs, question/answer boards, industry groups, etc., you increase the chances of your business being found and being chosen.
Step #9: Improve and Update Your Content - SEO is dynamic, you can’t simply write your content once and forget it. You have to keep updating to meet the needs of a changing economy, changing laws, changing SEO techniques and so much more. Millions of websites are built and abandoned each day and Google search continuously patrols the web determining which websites are still active and which are not. By adding or changing your content regularly, you are signalling to Google that your website is still relevant. And you stay relevant to your potential customers by staying up to date.
Conclusion
Search engines are a very powerful consumer resource. Today, nearly 80% of the decision to select a trucking partner or third-party logistics company has been made by what a client has found online. That is one of the biggest reasons why search engines are also very powerful as marketing tools. They can be highly effective in reaching new consumers as well. But for you to benefit from SEO in the Transportation or Construction Industry, it has to be among the top results.
With a well-executed SEO strategy for your specific business, you can boost your search engine rankings and in turn boost your revenue - cost-effectively. SEO takes time to work as search engines reevaluate your website’s reputation and increase its visibility based on your site’s credibility and relevance. Remember too, that SEO is not a set-it-and-forget-it type of endeavor, instead, it has to be continuously improved on so you can stay relevant.
Learn more with Google's Search Engine Optimization Guide:
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