When it comes to digital marketing, good SEO is crucial. Most business owners will know that they need to have good SEO when they start out to ensure that potential leads find them. However, SEO isn’t just a once and done job. You’ll need to continually maintain it, in order to get the best effects. Here’s why that is and how you can use ongoing SEO maintenance on your site. 

The Importance of SEO

Firstly, you need to have a good understanding of why SEO is so important, and how it affects your lead generation. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s how you optimize your site so the right people find it in search listings when they need it the most. 

There are lots of different ways you can organise your site and help leads find it, but it all boils down to sorting the information and offering it in a way that’s easy for search engines to crawl and find. There are two main ways you can do this: on page and off page SEO.

• On page SEO: This includes content optimization, such as using keywords, meta descriptions, meta tags, continual new content, and so on.
• Off page SEO: This focuses on back link building, where links from other trustworthy sites link back to your website. 

On top of all this, you’ll want to focus on mobile SEO, too. Search engines like Google have a mobile first policy, so your strategies need to consider how they’d work on mobile platforms. Having a good mobile design means that your site will rank highly. 

Why SEO Needs to Be Monitored

When you first set up your site, you’ll have a lot of work to do when it comes to SEO. You’ll need to get it all set up and ensure that you’re making it easy for the right people to find you when they need you. That’s important work and it needs to be done, but it’s not something that you’ll want to do once and then forget about. 

Ongoing SEO services will always be an ongoing process when it comes to your marketing. What is ongoing SEO, and why do you need it?

Market shifts: The market will never stay the same, so you have to be able to follow trends and see what’s happening right now online. In this day and age, the trends are changing all the time. Your marketing team needs to be able to watch them closely and make changes to SEO in response to those changes. When they do that, they’re keeping up with what the general public are looking for. If you’re not keeping up with market shifts, then you’re going to be left behind. 

Staying ahead of competitors: “When you first started out, you most likely took a look at your competitors to see what they were offering,” says Diane Reardon, a marketing writer at Research Papers UK and Writinity. “Now you’re up and running, you need to be keeping an eye on them to see what they do.” Your competitors could make changes to their own SEO, and that can lead to them overtaking you in the rankings. If you pay attention and update your own SEO, you can stay competitive. 

Being up to date with algorithms: The markets and competitors aren’t the only things that can change. Search engine algorithms are updated regularly, too. Google, for example, updates theirs at least three times a year. When they change, that can change the way your site is ranked, and you need to be ready for that. Search engines make changes to avoid tactics such as keyword stuffing and redirects, so you need to keep using above board tactics to stay on top of the search engine results page. 

Keeping Your SEO Updated

You’ve seen the importance of ongoing SEO and ensuring that you get the best search results every time. You now can see that SEO is a continuous process and that you have to keep working on it. How do you keep it updated, and how do you know when to make changes? Here’s some tips to help you stay ahead of the game. 

Watch SEO trends: This is one of the most important things you can do. “SEO trends change constantly, and you want to be on top of them,” says Richard Fairfield, a business blogger at Draft Beyond. “Your marketing team needs to be up to date with what’s happening right now.”

Your team should watch the trends, and see what affects your needs. If the trends change and you need to change your SEO accordingly, they can move quickly to do so. The quicker they can address that trend, the quicker you can start taking advantage of it. 

Change up website content: Your website content as a whole should be changed up roughly on a yearly basis. When you rewrite the content and make it fresh and new, it actually helps your SEO rankings as a whole. Make a point of changing it on a regular basis so it doesn’t get stale. 

Don’t forget that things will need to be changed when you make changes as a business. For example, if you switch vendors, start selling in a new area, or add new items, the site needs to be changed to reflect that. If you’re accurate in displaying what your business offers, it makes your business more reputable in the eyes of the search engine algorithm and that leads to higher rankings. 

Monitor your SEO: There are lots of very helpful SEO tools out there, so you want to make sure you’re making good use of them. These show you how your SEO is affecting your website traffic and lead generation, and that’s information that’s vital to have. 

With tools like Google Analytics, you can see quite quickly whether your new SEO strategy is making headway online. Are you going to see success with it? If not, then you can make changes dependent on what you see here. 

Keep blogging: This is a very common SEO tip, and for good reason. Something that search engines look for constantly is fresh content. The newer it is, the better from their perspective. If you want your site to be picked up by search engines, a blog will help you do just this. 

If you start blogging, you need to ensure that you blog regularly and with content that’s relevant to the audience you’re looking to attract. Constantly putting out new content, will help your SEO dramatically. 

Research keywords: The keywords you used when you first set up your site will have brought you success at first, but you will need to keep them updated if you want to stay relevant. As such, you’ll want to invest in keyword research so you can widen your scope. 

Using new keywords shows you have new opportunities for visitors, and it helps bring in those new leads. Keeping they keywords updated will help over time. 

Keep an eye on your competitors: When you first set up your site, you will have looked at other companies out there similar to yours to see how they were utilizing SEO. This is something you’ll want to pay attention to as a new site, as you can see what works for them and emulate it. It’s a good way to get started, but you still want to be keeping a close eye on them even after you set your site up. 

You want to be the top ranking website in your industry, and so you’ll need to keep an eye on the competition to see what they’re doing: what are they doing right, what keywords are they using, and what does their audience enjoy? It’s important that you keep an eye on them, but make sure that you’re not copying what they’re doing as that can actually get you penalized by search engines. 

Monitor your backlinks: You’ll always want to keep an eye on your backlinks, as they boost your reputation when done right. Ensure that you’re being linked by the most trustworthy sites by doing your research and talking to these sites to create backlink opportunities. 

You can also keep an eye on your competitors’ backlinks, as you can see what works for them and use those strategies yourself.

Stay active on social media: You should know that being active on social media won’t directly affect your SEO, but it’s a tool that you don’t want to neglect. You’ll want to do your research into what social media your audience is using and start being active there. Not all platforms will be right for you, so be sure that you’re going where your audience is to make the most impact. 

When you’re active on a platform, you can start sending traffic to your site from it. If people are following you on social media, they’re more likely to visit your site. That will help improve your SEO by decreasing bounce rates, increase time on site, and so on. 

As you can see, continually monitoring and tweaking your SEO is crucial. Search engines and trends change all the time, so if you keep an eye on your SEO, you can stay ahead of the pack.