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Virtual Assistance
Considering how the online market is just as, and in some ways, even more competitive than the actual brick-and-mortar scene, it’s not such a far-fetched thing to assume most business owners will know about search engine optimization.
On the off-chance you are one of the few who don’t, however, we’ll give a short explanation. Search engine optimization is a multi-faceted process that enables your website rank higher in the search engine results page, also known as SERPs.
The higher up you are on the SERPs, the better your chances are of customers choosing your brand for what they are looking for. Mind you, it depends on the keywords the people use to find something, and you might rank differently depending on the phrases and words used.
SEO specialists have become a staple in the online marketing world. This is understandable considering how 61% of marketers admit how improving organic presence is one of their top priorities in inbound marketing campaigns.
But can one person really handle it all? SEO specialists are more than just internet researchers, and they go beyond simply doing web research in order to gather data for analytics. Here, we lay down how you can make full use of your virtual assistant to climb higher on the ranking ladder.
How to leverage your virtual assistant properly for SEO
Before we get to how you can instruct your VA for SEO duties, though, we’ll define what a VA actually is. A VA, or virtual assistant, is somebody who helps with any excess tasks a company has to handle. Usually working remotely, they can handle a wide variety of tasks, and can be specialized in several industries.
This depends, of course, on the experience the VA has amassed. A lot of VAs are people who wish to start working from home, and another benefit they have is they are more often than not more affordable compared to full-time employees.
So, who needs virtual assistants? Well, to be honest, most companies do. They are quite handy to have with a lot of prior experience under their belts, which they utilize in streamlining the workflow of companies, and lessening the amount of tasks in-house employees need to perform.
Why do SEO specialists need help?
Back when SEO officially started back in 1997, obviously, there were a lot less people making use of it in their online marketing campaigns. Aside from the fact that not a lot of people had easy access to the internet back then, but even fewer business owners were willing to invest in something which hadn’t been proven to be effective.
To be fair, a lot of them were right when they said it just wasn’t worth it at the time. But today, over 20 years after its inception, we have data available that readily backs up the fact that SEO is necessary if a company wants to stay competitive in the online scene.
Over 51% of all website traffic comes from organically developed websites (meaning they didn’t pay to get a top spot on the SERPs) and over 40% of revenue is captured from this kind of traffic. Considering over 1 billion (this is only for Google) people use search engines a month, it’s easy to see how businesses need to up their SEO game.
Such an obviously beneficial strategy, of course, doesn’t come easy, nor does it come cheap. Specialists in SEO have more than a lot on their plate every day, and if you were to consider hiring more, it would mean a considerable investment. This is where VAs come in.
How can you maximize your VA’s abilities to help with SEO?
Photo by Lovefreund
Even if your virtual assistants have little to no experience in the field of SEO, there are still some ways wherein you can have them enhance your SEO efforts. Of course, you can’t expect them to be as effective as another SEO specialist, but any help from them can still have a big impact.
Even though their tasks are far from easy, not everything an SEO specialist does requires expert-level knowledge in order to accomplish. If you can make full use of your virtual assistant in handling these kinds of tasks, your SEO specialist will be free to analyze the websites, as well as learn any new techniques to apply to your campaign.
So the very first thing you need to keep in mind is your VAs are no SEO consultants. They will not be able to answer any questions which require in-depth knowledge in the field, and they are mostly used in the implementation of tasks rather in the brainstorming or evaluation jobs.
Here are some examples of tasks your VA can handle for your SEO specialist.
Keyword research
One task you can assign to your virtual assistant is keyword research. Although stuffing keywords into your content is not the way to go, keywords themselves still have a very important role to play in satisfying the intent of your readers.
As long as your SEO specialist is able to lay down a guideline for the VA to follow, they are rid of one of the most time-consuming parts of finding the right keywords. Just make sure SEO specialist will properly create a flow so the virtual assistant can easily follow the necessary steps.
Setting up tools, as well as monitoring
There are a plethora of SEO tools which specialists use in order to view how the website is going, as well as to assist them in any other facet of the SEO campaign. A lot of these are installed on the browser itself, and some of them are also separate programs installed on the computer.
It is a rather simple affair to install these tools, and VAs will naturally be able to do this. However, the virtual assistants may also be trusted to report any findings they gather from monitoring the tools as well. If there is anything beyond their knowledge, they can simply inform the specialist who will then pick up where the VA left off.
Competitor research
Another thing VAs can help with is checking out what the competition is doing. Although most virtual assistants won’t be able to completely analyze and dissect the competition’s actions from simply looking at their website, they can be given a list of things to look out for.
They are able to check what keywords are being used most often, and if they’ve been doing this task more than once, can be used to check if the competition has made any recent changes to their domain. The VAs will also be able to check what the competitor is offering, as comparing rates will be a good way to stay competitive in the online sphere.
Content tracking
Some virtual assistants are already tasked to submit content pieces to websites. Because of this, tracking how the content piece is doing will be an easy transition. The VAs will easily be able to report the metrics of a certain content piece, then the SEO specialist will then be able to decide what to do about it.
Basically any task you can think of which requires research and monitoring can easily be handled by the VA. This way, the SEO specialist will have more time on their hands to focus on the website itself, and perhaps adjust anything to help it gain a better ranking.
In closing
When all is said and done, if your VA doesn’t have the expertise of an SEO specialist, then it cannot be expected that they be able to perform some of the more knowledge-dependent tasks like analysis and learning any new techniques or trends.
However, there is a reason why there was a 79.7% growth in the number of virtual workers last year in the US alone. Virtual assistants are quick to adapt to most any situation, and even when they aren’t experts on a certain subject, they will be able to do most of the tasks assigned to them.
