How To Manage Ongoing SEO for Your Site

Almost half of all product searches start on Google, but less than 1% of searchers click on the second page of results. If you want to beat the competition, you need to make it onto the first page. Search engine optimization is how you get there. However, SEO is not a race you win once and then move on to the next challenge. Initial optimizing can get you to the top, but ongoing SEO is what keeps you there.

What Is Ongoing SEO?

SEO is the process of making your site easy for your target audience to find in search engines. Ongoing SEO is the process of adjusting your SEO strategies to maintain your rankings over time.

Why Is Ongoing Optimization Necessary?

SEO requires ongoing maintenance because the various factors that affect your search engine rankings are always changing.

Market Changes

New products, news, movies, trends, and even memes spawn popular search terms every day. An effective SEO strategy must adapt to changes in the market and the language customers use to search for the information they want.

Competitors

Competitors may enter or leave the market. The competition may also change its strategy in ways that impact your rankings.

A SEO-savvy new competitor or a competitor that suddenly improves their SEO strategy can overtake you in the rankings for your target keywords. You must be ready to adjust your ongoing SEO strategy accordingly.

Search Engine Algorithms

Search engines change their algorithms frequently to provide a better user experience for their customers and to thwart the efforts of people who try to game the system. Because of this, SEO practices that work today may not perform as well after a search engine update.

What Are the Benefits of Ongoing SEO?

Ongoing search engine optimization not only increases the traffic to your site but improves the relevance of the traffic so that more of it converts to sales. It also boosts reader engagement to help build trust and loyalty, which is good for your revenue and your search engine rankings.

What Are Important SEO Best Practices?

There are a variety of ways you can achieve and maintain high rankings by implementing SEO techniques on an ongoing basis.

Monitor and Analyze Performance

Start by establishing goals for key performance indicators, such as organic traffic, click-through rates, keyword rankings, and conversion rates. Use tools, such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console, to monitor your KPIs. Make sure that the search engines are indexing all the pages on your site.

Update Content

Update your content at least every 12-18 months to optimize it for the latest algorithms, ranking factors, and market trends. If you change the keywords you want to target as part of your ongoing SEO strategy, update older content to reflect those keywords. Update content with any new products and services you are offering or major changes to the way you do business.

Add New Content

Freshness is one of the major ranking factors search engines consider. Blogging regularly is an SEO-friendly way to ensure you always have fresh content for the search engines to crawl.

Be Active on Social Media

Maintaining a social media presence doesn’t directly affect your rankings. However, it can generate more traffic for your site and boost engagement.

Better engagement can improve the metrics search engines consider when ranking your site. Be sure to track which platforms your target audience is on so that you can focus your social media campaigns on those platforms.

Monitor Your Competition

Search engines penalize unoriginal content, so you don’t want to mimic your competitors too closely. However, keep an eye on what they are doing and which keywords they are ranking for as part of your ongoing SEO plan. This information can help you formulate a strategy to outrank them as well as identify low-competition keywords to target.

Ensure Pages Are Mobile Friendly

Because more people are starting searches on mobile devices, search engines weight their ranking process more heavily in favor of mobile-friendly sites. To keep your rankings high, ensure your content is easy to see and navigate on a variety of mobile devices.

Check for Broken Links

Site owners periodically remove content or move it to a new location. When this happens, your links may stop working. Broken links create a negative experience for users and can cause your pages to rank lower.

Build Backlinks

Backlinks are links from other people’s sites to yours. Backlinks from authoritative sites help establish your authority, which can boost your rankings.

Encourage backlinks by reaching out to industry influencers, guest posting on relevant sites, and improving your internal linking process. Monitor your site for any irrelevant backlinks and use Google’s Disavow Tool to tell search engines to ignore them.

Improve User Experience

Search engines want to direct users to sites that are useful to them. As a result, the search algorithms reward sites that are user-friendly with higher rankings.

Improving your user experience will improve your ongoing SEO. Make sure your pages load quickly, are easy to navigate, and contain compelling content. Track your bounce rates, time on page, and exit rates. If a lot of people are visiting your page and then leaving quickly, you may need to adjust your content or keyword strategy.

Check Local Listings

If you have a physical presence for your business that local customers can visit, local search is important for your success. Make sure your local listings have updated contact information.

Respond to customer reviews. Add products and photos to your profile and optimize some of your blog posts with local SEO keywords and topics of local interest.

How Can BKA Help With Your Ongoing SEO?

Any effective ongoing SEO strategy must focus on regularly adding SEO-optimized fresh content and updating older content to keep rankings high. BKA offers SEO-optimized blog writing services to help you meet your goals without having to produce the content yourself. Additionally, we help clients track and update their blogs as needed to ensure they hold value for a long time and provide white hat link-building services to further boost your rankings. Learn more about what we have to offer today.