SEO
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SEO Maintenance: All You Need to Know
Published On May 31, 2024
Introduction
Google's second page is the best place to hide something in this world!
Jokes apart, however, in a survey conducted by Moz, 75% of respondents said they only check the first or second results to solve their query or scroll to the first page. Another Ahrefs study shows that 96.55% of content does not receive organic traffic on Google.
It's all about the first page and the first several results. That’s why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is crucial. You may be working on the SEO part of your website. But are you constantly maintaining your website's SEO? How is SEO affected? Do You know what is SEO Maintenance plan and how to implement an SEO strategy for a website?
Read on; this blog is a complete guide on SEO Maintenance for a website.. This blog covers everything you need to know and do about SEO maintenance.
How does SEO work?
In reality, SEO is a very complex process to manage and maintain with its technicalities. Also, businesses or websites differ in terms of specifications, goals, objectives, and specialties.
To combine the technical details of SEO with the functionality of your website, you need a complete SEO strategy.
First, let’s know more about how SEO works on a website:
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO or on-site SEO is the process of optimizing web pages and their content for search engines and users. On-page SEO helps your website rank better in Google and get organic traffic.
On-page SEO tasks include optimizing website content, keywords, title tags, meta descriptions, etc.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO or Off-site works to facilitate link-building for your website. Backlinks on any website direct the users from search engines to your website and build authority. Even search engine algorithms establish a trust factor based on backlinks to your website.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO focuses on improving your website. Optimizing your website to make it easier for search engines to find, understand, and index your website content is called technical SEO.
What is SEO Maintenance?
What is SEO Maintenance
SEO maintenance is the routine and ongoing process of maintaining and improving a website's search engine rankings by focusing on website’s SEO.
It includes daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly SEO maintenance tasks.
Why is ongoing SEO maintenance needed?
Here are four main reasons why SEO maintenance is necessary:
1. Ranking in Search Results is Temporary
When you get the number one ranking, you can celebrate that rank, but you must know here that rankings are not permanent. If you are ranked, someone else will get it on another day.
That's why you require an ongoing SEO maintenance plan to continuously optimize your website for better rankings.
With a core SEO maintenance part of your SEO Strategy, you can maintain a lead with your competitors. You can refresh your website content by updating targeted keywords, fixing broken links, etc. This way, you can continue to maintain users on your website and optimize your pages for search engines.
If you don't constantly optimize your website's content, you can lose search engine rankings and user engagement. You may also fall behind on the second page or beyond.
According to a survey by Teknicks, only 6.6% of people are willing to go to the second page or beyond for a Google search.
Are you wanting to see your website on the second page of a Google search?
2. Search Engine Algorithms are Dynamic
Algorithms that empower search engines and search rankings are in constant change.
Google makes thousands of changes to its algorithms every year. These changes can be small or large and can affect your SEO strategy. For example, Google has shifted the mobile-first index for web pages, so many businesses have gone to responsive and mobile-friendly websites.
Maintaining SEO constantly is the answer to every algorithm change in search engines. And even if you do not go after it, that will surely impact your website.
If your web pages continue to be vulnerable with that old-age content and slow speed to pop up, your rankings will decrease dramatically. Decreased rankings will result in low website traffic, less lead generation, and deficient sales numbers.
However, with ongoing SEO maintenance, you can keep optimizing your web pages to keep them up-to-date with algorithm changes. This can make your website more popular, get more people interested, and increase sales.
3. Competitors are using the SEO strategy
In the past, businesses could skip continuous SEO maintenance because of the little effects on the website.
Nowadays, every business pays attention to their website's SEO. Every business keeps improving by upgrading existing content, targeted keywords, links, etc. on their website because of the competitive market.
Either you must adopt SEO for your website or you will fall behind in website traffic, engagements, reach, leads, etc. To compete in the market and get ranked in search engines, you have to maintain your website's SEO with a defined strategy.
Otherwise, your plan will produce results for a short term. However, with SEO maintenance, you can stay competitive and earn the first spot in search results.
4. SEO is a Constant Process
Today, every business is utilizing SEO for their website, but most of them assume that SEO is a once-and-done strategy. As the market changes to recession and business changes, so will your website's SEO.
Additionally, SEO is a long-term process that needs to be done with continuous maintenance. The required tasks of SEO, from content to link building, must be completed consistently to get the best return on investment (ROI).
If you are looking at SEO as a static, one-time tactic, you are likely to not see the results you’re looking for. SEO maintenance helps here to get you the returns and improve your rankings.
Depending on the size of your website, your SEO maintenance plan only requires a few hours every month to give you targeted results. If you don’t have the time, many agencies provide SEO Services that save you time and resources. They maintain your SEO strategy to garner results.
Alternatively, collaborating with a full SEO service agency can help your business grow digitally faster.
SEO Maintenance Checklist
If you’re looking for SEO maintenance in-house by yourself, start with these four SEO tactics.
1. Tracking Website Activity
Frequency: Weekly, Monthly, and Quarterly
Tool(s): Google Analytics, Google Search Console
Tactic: Tracking website activity and web page performance on time is an essential task in SEO for a website’s digital marketing. In this task, you monitor click-through rate (CTR), rankings, page views, etc.
These metrics will help your team find the pages that need improvement. For instance, you can refine the content as per updated keywords.
Track your website performance with these two tools: 1) Google Analytics; 2) Google Search Console.
In Google Search Console, you can identify crucial data on pages as follows:
-
- Queries
- Impressions
- Clicks
- CTRs
In the same way, in Google Analytics, you can monitor user behavior as follows:
- Pageviews
- Time on Page
- Bounce Rate
2. Modify Broken and Redirected Links
Frequency: Monthly
Tool(s): Screaming Frog
Tactic: Broken links (also known as 404 links) cause problems for users and search engines like Google.
Imagine you need to find an instant solution to something. You search on Google, get several results, click one of them, and the page opens as Page Not Found or Error 404. What will you do?
Most likely, you will click back, and move on to another result. This action is called Pogo-sticking. Here, it can be your website that may show ‘Page Not Found’ and impact your search results.
With a tool like Screaming Frog, a free tool that crawls up to 500 URLs, you can easily find broken links. According to your website, you may need HTML experience or help from a developer to repair broken links on your website.
Additionally, with the help of Screaming Frog, you can also uncover redirected links (301s) that usually go unnoticed by users. However, Google does notice but does not care about desirable redirects. Therefore, it is worth modifying 301 error links by updating the URL to the new one.
Act on this SEO maintenance tactic every month and fix broken and redirected links.
3. Manage Local Listings
Frequency: Monthly
Tool(s): Google Sheets
Tactic: Broken links (also known as 404 links) cause problems for users and search engines like Google.
Local businesses need to be updated on local listings frequently. Because people generally find businesses via a local listing by searching on Google 'near me'. This type of search shows relevant local listings before organic search results.
As a local business, you need to stay updated on your local listings. Essential information about your business should be up-to-date, like your business name, phone number, and address (NAP).
As part of your SEO maintenance, keep this information accurate on your website. You can act on this task with a free tool like Google Sheets to maintain, update, and change the info. Local listing tools can help you with local SEO.
4. Enhancing Present Content
Frequency: Monthly
Tool(s): Google Search Console, Google Docs, Keywordtool.io
Tactic: Your website may have evergreen content that serves best on the web. Still, it’s not enough. You need to update your existing content with relevant and updated keywords and the latest objectives of users.
You can trace the content upgrade after getting the idea of three essential questions:
1. Is your content still accurate and up-to-date?
2. Do your web pages still connect to current search queries?
3. Are Users still searching for your targeted keywords?
Accurate content, relevant keywords, and connection with search queries are three bases for updating existing content to get optimization. Sometimes your page content is accurate, but the keywords are outdated or not connected with search queries.
You need to refine pages with updated keywords, search queries, and content accuracy for better search results. You can find pages that require re-optimization in the Google Search Console with decreasing impressions and clicks.
After determining the pages that need updates, you can move forward to keywords. To update your content’s core keywords with relevant alternatives, you can use Google or KeywordTool.io
This SEO maintenance tactic can help you improve your search rankings with the most relevant content. Remember, you need to stick with the ongoing SEO maintenance process for targeted results.
Finalize your SEO strategy today
If you are not able to maintain SEO continuously, then worry not.
We can help you with our result-driven SEO services. Our highly skilled SEO team provides proven SEO strategies as per your business requirements.
At Wolfable, we provide growth-oriented digital marketing services to many businesses across various industries, such as education, healthcare, manufacturing, finance, and more.
Contact us now, and we will discuss your digital marketing strategy to grow your business in this digitally connected world of marketing!
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
1What is SEO?
Search engine optimization is the process of maintaining a website's search engine ranking, keywords, & content relevancy while being technically updated with internet changes.
2Can I maintain SEO for my website?
Yes, you can do SEO maintenance for your website, but it is a continuous process and requires SEO experts after basic SEO maintenance.
3How can I do ongoing SEO maintenance?
You can do ongoing SEO maintenance by making continuous efforts your website’s on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis as per requirement.
4Is ongoing SEO Maintenance costly?
Ongoing SEO maintenance has different budgets as per the requirements of websites and tools.
5What are the best free SEO tools?
There are many free SEO tools, such as Google Analytics, Bing Webmaster Tools, Screaming Frog, Bright Local, Google Search Console, Google Trends, Google Keyword Planner, etc.
