If you don’t have a SEO maintenance strategy in place today, you may want to consider developing one! You won’t find many people who dispute the value of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The rise of SEO – barely even recognizable as “a thing” just 15 years ago – is attributable, not surprisingly, to the rise of search engines. It makes sense that search engines have to make decisions about how they display their results, and that landing at the top of a search result list can have significant consequences, both positive and negative, for a website operator.
Three Keys For Your SEO Maintenance Strategy
Search engine companies go out of their way to protect their search algorithms in an effort to prevent site operators from unduly (or unfairly) influencing the results of a user’s searches. SEO companies do their best to help their clients improve or retain coveted placements in search engine results. Moving up in the results list is accomplished only by displacing a site that’s already there, and that can be difficult, to say the least.
Maintaining a high ranking in search results can be likewise challenging, so having a SEO maintenance strategy – regardless of where your website currently lands in search engine results – is nearly a requirement. Good search engine placement is a moving target, so your SEO maintenance strategy must take into account a number of variables, including the terms your site is ranked for, the number of other sites that may be attempting to displace you, and the changes that search engine companies make to their ranking formulae.
Whether you have the time and staff to develop and implement your own SEO maintenance strategy, or you’re looking for someone who can provide that service for you, having a SEO maintenance strategy is critical, especially if your website plays a large role in your business. If you derive a measurable portion of your revenue from your website, a SEO maintenance strategy is like an insurance policy for that portion of your business income. It only makes sense to do things that guard, protect and promote that revenue stream.
Monitoring. A key component of your SEO maintenance strategy is monitoring. To know where you are in the rankings, and whether you’re moving up, moving down or staying in the same place, you need to monitor your position in all of the major search engines. This metric is something you can track monthly. Shorter monitoring periods are probably not helpful because your site ranking can vary daily based on conditions that are out of your control. Knowing the general trend for your website, however, can help you determine the effectiveness of your current SEO strategy.
Referral tracking. While it’s important to know where you are on the ladder, it’s also very important to know where your visitors are coming from. If most of your visitors are coming from one particular search engine, you may want to tweak your SEO maintenance strategy to ensure that your stream of visitors remains uninterrupted. On the other hand, if you’re not having much success in attracting visitors from another search engine, you may need to make changes to your site to improve its overall attractiveness.
Keyword effectiveness. Keywords play an important role in SEO, so keeping on top of your existing keywords, and considering new keywords is important. Keyword research must be done regularly to ensure that your keywords are still relevant to what users are searching for. As new keywords emerge, you’ll need to modify your SEO maintenance strategy to take advantage of this shift in user preferences.
If you would like more information about how to develop a new SEO maintenance strategy for your website, or you would like to review your existing SEO maintenance strategy, please contact our Creative Director, Dave Ramsell or give Dave a call at (330) 243-0651 to set up a consultation.
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