The point of a website is to have people view it and engage, right?
It seems obvious, maybe? And yet so many people forget this when they have a website.
SEO (search engine optimization) is the science (and art) of bringing visitors to your website. It’s the billboard, the megaphone, the thing that pushes your site out in front of the rest. If you paid a bunch of money for a billboard, would you let it fade, tear, and lose its appeal?
Of course not. You paid good money for that billboard. You’re going to get someone out there to wash it and stitch it up. You would even have them replace it if necessary. Keeping your website front and center to your audience takes more skill than putting up any billboard, and it’s far more effective.
Here are the long-term benefits of website SEO maintenance.
The Basics of SEO
Search engines like Google send little bots around the internet. These bots check various aspects and qualities of websites, indexing them into a library of content. When you use a search engine, it produces recommendations based on what it thinks you are looking for in the search bar.
How does it rank what has found? It checks things like the subject matter, speed, scan ability, user experience, navigation and more It even measures how popular and useful your site seems.
Getting a website to rank well takes building out these qualities. That is what SEO does.
What are these qualities? Things that make the search engine believe you will be interesting to someone with particular needs.
Search engines rank by keyword (relevance), internal and external links (popular), and backlinks (useful).
So if you want people to visit your site, you need to be relevant to what they are looking for, popular, and useful.
And you need to stay that way.
Benefits of Regular SEO Maintenance
Website owners make the mistake of “setting and forgetting” their site’s SEO.
It’s easy to see why. It can seem…a little boring.
This becomes a problem. Like a jungle habitat or the prices at the grocery store, SEO is changing constantly. Search engines update their algorithms all the time, customer taste changes, and there are plenty of competitors fighting to move up the front page for any query.
Just treading water takes work, let alone making headway.
Regular SEO maintenance can take care of both.
And there are extra benefits if your site is big or growing. If you are adding more content or already have a ton of it, search engines can have a hard time getting through it all. It takes extra work to make sure you are not cannibalizing keywords and stealing traffic from yourself.
Proper SEO maintenance ensures that you are growing the way you want to.
List of Potential Services
Keeping your website optimized means focusing on those essential qualities each month.
To do this you want to monitor your keywords, analyze your site’s traffic, keep track of the click-through rate and organic traffic, and make improvements.
Monitoring keywords means comparing the keywords your site’s content was built around with your customers’ search queries and your placement on search engines.
While your site might have been optimized around these keywords before, customers can change how they’re searching, or the search engines might have altered their algorithms such that those keywords are no longer the best choice.
Keywords and search criteria are more fluid than they appear. Staying ahead of changes means paying attention.
Analyzing a site’s traffic is necessary for knowing where the traffic to your site is coming from. Properly functioning SEO should bring in visitors organically (without you paying for ads) and should have a low bounce rate (meaning people stay when they arrive).
If your website is experiencing low traffic or a high bounce rate, we want to know. It could mean that your keywords need updating or that the content of your site needs to be refreshed.
Once you have checked your website’s metrics, create a strategy to improve them.
Improving a website can benefit from an expert’s handling because you want to take a comprehensive approach and make sure each avenue’s potential is realized.
At Second Click, we use your data to create a tailored and comprehensive plan to improve and maintain your site.
The key areas we focus on are:
Technical SEO
- Scanning and fixing broken links
- Fixing ‘page not found’ errors with 301 redirects
- Speed optimization
- Fixing mobile usability issues
Content Creation
- Writing blog posts
- Updating existing pages to include additional content types such as testimonials
- Adding FAQs to top-level services or category pages
- Adding introductory text to product category pages
On-Site Optimization
- Diving deeper into the customization of page titles and meta descriptions than was completed during the SEO Set-Up
- Updating alternative text across the media library
- Updating top pages or posts to have more keyword-friendly headers
Off-Site SEO
- Active management of the Google Maps listing
- Citation building
- Consulting and collaboration on link building
These descriptions are only an introduction to the range of actions we take to keep your site at its best.
Ongoing Review and Assessment
SEO maintenance requires constant vigilance and expertise to recognize what’s working, what’s not, and what to do about it.
The internet can be a harsh environment, and you need to adapt quickly to algorithm changes and shifts in customer tastes if you want to survive.
A quality review and assessment regimen will track changes made to your site, measure their effectiveness, and create plans for further improvement.
We include this as part of our SEO maintenance package because we know how important assessing a website’s metrics is.
In Conclusion
If you want your website to continue bringing in more visitors, you’ll want to maintain your SEO.
And if you want to realize the full benefits that are possible, you’ll want to partner with someone who knows what they’re doing, is transparent with you, and isn’t going to rip you off.
We have years of experience helping our clients beat out their competitors for the top spots on search pages and keeping them there.
If you’re looking to take your SEO to the next level and stay there get started by scheduling a call.
