COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE
Website content and SEO optimization Becoming the ranking king or queen is easier than you think
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s much of the auction industry sheltered in place for the past couple of months, auction professionals became keenly aware that they could fill their days with business development tasks they never had time to do before. “Search engine optimization (SEO) is a fantastic way during shelter in place orders to engage with customers and build on available resources,” said John Schultz, AMM, chief technology officer for Grafe Auction. One unfortunate thing about COVID-19 is that many small businesses across the country are going to close, and those people are going to go to Google, where 96 percent of search engine traffic occurs. “When somebody asks a question, we want to make sure we have website content around the answers to that question,” Schultz said. The idea with SEO is that when someone searches for a particular topic on Google, it gives them all kinds of ideas. If someone searches, for example, “How to sell my business equipment,” the first thing that shows
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up may be an ad, but the next item may be a website that is organically showing up based on how Google thinks that page on that website answers the question. “We are going to look at some organic ways to create content for you to start creating a much more robust website to rank higher in the results for key search words, whatever they might be,” Schultz said. Halfway down the search page, Google also drops in a section of drop downs called “People also ask,” which features different ways of asking the same question. It gives the searcher the ability to modify their keywords to possibly find better answers, but for our purposes, it also allows businesses to identify content for their website. What phrases are people going to use when they go into Google? When you start typing in the search bar, you can see Google is starting to pre-fill the search bar with ideas. Those are key phrases to optimize on your website. “We’ll go to our website and create a page with the title: ‘How to sell my business
equipment,’” Schultz said. “And on that page you’re going to write content, a short twothree paragraphs, 500-600 words, about how to sell business equipment.” Schultz suggests that if you create a blog, you want it to be on your website, which will give you better SEO for your entire website. He also cautions not to slant content too much, saying the only way to sell it is at an auction. “You’re going to want to give your audience a wide variety of how to sell business equipment,” he said. The resource or blog page would literally start with, “The way to sell your business equipment is…” and then you’ll use the other results on Google to create additional content. In addition to the People also ask section, at the bottom of the search page you will see related searches: how do I sell my business assets; how do you liquidate a small business. You might start a second resource page on your website with the exact title matching those questions “Sometimes you see questions that don’t relate to your business,” Schultz said, “but
