How can we use quiet time productively?

It looks like many businesses are heading for a quiet period in the coming weeks and months which can make it difficult to know where to prioritise resources. If your business is in a fortunate enough position to hang on in there until the effects of COVID-19 begin to taper off, you might be wondering where you could be focusing your efforts during the downtime.

We are doing our damndest to maintain a positive mental attitude during all of this. That means switching some of our focus onto our own personal projects which we usually put to one side. The projects which might just yield some longer term results. We are looking ahead to the end goal. After we have had a cuppa tea and waited for this all to blow over, obviously.

Let’s face it, most of us are guilty of this. We chant daily that ‘content is king’, stress to clients that content is crucial to successful website growth, spend countless hours working on amazing and carefully thought-out creative campaigns for projects, and then totally neglect our own websites. It’s understandable. We are busy delivering exciting client projects. We run low on creative juice after a long day working on something awesome. We promise ourselves we will look at our own stuff tomorrow. But tomorrow hardly ever comes.

So, we figure that a bit of quiet time is actually a fantastic time to work on our website content! All of those fantastic ideas you’ve had, all of that creative juice you’re storing up, all of the time you have freed up; let’s invest it in your own business!

We know that SEO is a longer game. The content you write today might work really well for you in 6 months. So start today. Write something. Draw something. Build something. Turn your ideas into something people can enjoy (and hopefully link to!).

Even small content changes will get picked up by the Google algorithms – update those FAQ’s, your service pages, product descriptions or add some recent case studies. Show Google your business is still alive and well by adding fresh content.

There’s lots of on-site SEO improvements you could make to your website without needing any specialist help or training. Could your page title tags be improved? Could you optimise your images? How about adding some more internal links around the website?

Quiet time is a really good time to do an SEO audit and make some on-site SEO improvements. It could take 3 or more months for your edits to get picked up anyway, so there’s no better time than the present to get crackin’.

We don’t know about you, but our working practices were a bit… disorderly. We function well and we always end up relatively organised, but our systems and tools are a bit haphazard. Some of us love Slack, some prefer email, some use project management software, some of us good ol’ post-it notes.

Quiet time is a really good time to address this and work out new methods of working without causing total disarray. Without the pressure of tight deadlines, you can practice synching up new ways of working as a team.

And hey – presuming everyone is working remotely right now, what a brilliant way to test the system? You can’t scooch over and leave those post-it notes on my keyboard any more, can you Susan?

Just imagine, in some dystopian not-too-distant future, where toilet roll shelves are empty, dogs go for walks alone with drones, and everyone filed their tax returns and company accounts on the 6th April 2020. It’s unthinkable. But hey, perfectly possible when you’ve got some downtime to get ahead!

Here at Long Story Short, we are still actually pretty chocca, working on ongoing projects and a few new ones, which is awesome. We know not everyone is so fortunate. But we also want to recognise that tomorrow is finally here for many of us, so it’s the perfect time to work on that backlog of amazing ideas. Give us a shout if you need a hand!