Almost everything is happening online these days, and almost everyone is connected to the internet in some way, shape, or form. This is evident by the fact that there are around 4 billion Google users around the world and about 4.39 billion internet users.
What does this actually mean for businesses? This means that there are an estimated 5.6 billion searches per day, which would add up to about 2 trillion global searches per year.
For businesses, this number is incredibly important, because it means that people could discover your online store, blog, online magazine, whatever the case is, and there is one main contributing factor to this potential discovery; your SEO score.
That leads us to SEO maintenance. SEO maintenance is incredibly important, but what exactly is it, and why should you do it? Continue reading to find that out.
SEO Maintenance in a Nutshell
SEO maintenance is essentially an ongoing process that increases and maintains your rankings in search results, which is done by improving your SEO. Many people are under the impression that SEO rankings and algorithms are static, unfortunately, this isn’t true.
Keep in mind that in order for your site to move up the rankings, other sites will be moving down, which means that your spot isn’t permanent and can change at any time. This goes for the algorithms that determine your ranking as well.
These algorithms are changed and updated many times; Google improves its algorithm by making thousands of changes every year. This means that what you were doing to improve your SEO might not be working anymore, which is why maintenance is so important, and why digital marketing companies, like cozab.com, are important to use since they will be up-to-date with the best and latest SEO practices.
A great example of this is that the speed at which a website or page loads is now one of the ranking factors. If you have any older pages on your site that take quite a while to load, this will affect your ranking, which in turn will affect your traffic, sales, and lead generation.
What Can Be Done to Contribute to Maintenance?
Many companies provide services for SEO maintenance, and it’s important to know what these services do, and why they are needed. More than this, it is also important to know what you could be doing to contribute to ongoing SEO maintenance.
- Ensuring that keywords are up to date, and if not, finding and using new keywords that relate to your service, product, or topic.
- Go through evergreen content to see where it could be optimized, and routinely add new evergreen content.
- Focus on content that can be used for social media marketing purposes, as well as content that can be used for links.
- Using and reviewing all analytics that can provide an insight into where efficiency and performance can be increased.
- Keep an eye out for ways to generate, pursue or attract relevant and natural links.
- Focusing on the improvement of meta description and title tags to continue gaining momentum.
As you can see, there are many things that you can do in order to contribute to ongoing maintenance. From the list above, you should be able to see that SEO maintenance should be an ongoing endeavor, and it’s something that should be a vital part of the operations of any business.
Activities That Can Be Done Now
As mentioned above, there are many services that can be performed, as well as many things that you can do in order to begin SEO maintenance, however many of them are more for the long-term approach.
This doesn’t mean that there isn’t anything that you can do right now to begin the process of SEO maintenance.
Fix Broken Links
One thing that can be done right now is to begin fixing broken and redirected links. These are links that lead to your page which users click on, only to find themselves facing a page that says it cannot be found.
Users will then naturally go back to the search results and find another site to get what they need. This causes you to miss out on users that will improve your SEO by sticking around on your site, but more than this, it damages your ranking. Fixing broken links should be a monthly occurrence.
Monitor Performance
As mentioned above, statistics about your site are important, and the good news is that you can find out what those statistics are today. Having said that, not all statistics are incredibly important, and some statistics are more important than others.
Using Google Search Console, you can find important statistics such as CTR (click-through rate), impressions, queries, clicks, and more.
Using Google Analytics will allow you to see metrics such as the bounce rate for the site, the average time users spend on different pages, and pageviews. All of these can help you identify what needs to be improved today, and this should be monitored weekly, monthly, and quarterly.
Local Listings
If you are a business that has a physical address then maintaining local listings is of the utmost importance. There is a lot of important information that customers might need that can be listed, and making sure that the information is accurate is essential.
If for example, a customer sees your business and clicks on the listing to find a contact number because they’d like to enquire about a product, but there isn’t one, you lose out on a potential sale.
More than this, the listings appear before the search results, so if a lack of information, or incorrect information, leads to a negative review then everyone will see that. This should be updated and maintained monthly.
All in all, SEO maintenance is one of the most important things that you can do for your business, and can drastically improve your score. Remember, your ranking can change at any time, and your competitors are not stopping with maintenance, so they can easily take your ranking.
___________________________________________________
Some other articles you might find of interest:
Make your business rock with these business plan writing skills:
Startup’s Guide to Write a Business Plan
Would you like to know how investors value a startup?
How Do Investors Value a Startup?
