As the economy reopens across the country – and around the world – many companies are adjusting to a new reality. Doing business remotely is the norm now, and manufacturers need to learn to adapt.

With an emphasis on video conferencing and virtual meetings, it’s easy to overlook the basics. But your corporate website is an asset that deserves special attention. Now more than ever, a company’s website offers a vital first impression to people looking for your products and services online.

Google has announced that it’s preparing to add a new algorithm to its arsenal, this time based specifically on people’s experience with web pages.

The good news is that the algorithm won’t take effect until some point in 2021, so you have plenty of time to get ready.

The new algorithm is called the Google Page Experience update. It incorporates several ranking factors Google previously announced, with some new considerations thrown into the mix.

COVID-19 and its effect on everything from health to industry have everyone’s attention these days. It’s an undeniable fact of our times.

As a result, B2B content marketing strategies need to take this preoccupation into account – not to capitalize on it but to acknowledge customers’ very real and very immediate concerns.

Pushing ahead with your planned content marketing program without that acknowledgement can seem tone deaf if not downright insensitive. You need to adapt your strategies to today’s necessities. Businesses that can pivot to take their customers’ concerns into account will be the ones to succeed.

No doubt you’ve seen this on Google: A website on the first page of results that looks terrible, doesn’t seem to have much useful info and, yet, performs really well on the search engine. You might be even more frustrated because you’ve already spent a considerable amount of time optimizing your own site for SEO and wonder whether those efforts are wasted.

It’s easy to get caught up in all the details that go into optimizing one’s website. There are many content-related factors and technical SEO considerations. But, that’s not the end of it. One-half of Google’s algorithm, about 100 different factors, relate to what we call Off-Page SEO – the number and quality of backlinks to your site from third-party links.

If you’ve spent any time interviewing search engine optimization (SEO) firms, one of the things you’ll find is that the reputable ones will tell you “we can’t guarantee specific results in Google.”

While that phrase provides an honest assessment of our, or anyone’s ability to control Google, it also does the SEO industry a disservice because, quite frankly, SEO works.

SEO has been around for 22 years, since Google launched in 1998, and it’s still the most effective way to get qualified website traffic. In fact, we’re hearing from more and more clients that their websites have become their #1 lead generator since implementing SEO.

At the same time, SEO has become harder and more complicated with every update to Google’s algorithm. But the good SEO firms are ones that have developed a process they know works based on years of experience working on client websites. They also have the ability to track Google changes and adapt their clients’ SEO to meet current standards.