SEO Maintenance – What Is It and How Can It Benefit Your Business?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial for online businesses to build brand awareness, rank high on search engines, drive traffic to their website, and ultimately generate leads. Businesses invest in search engine optimization services when they start building their online presence. A successful SEO campaign comprises two parts, on-page SEO and off-page SEO. However, an SEO campaign is not a one-time practice that guarantees consistent online traffic and high rankings on search engines. It is a long-term strategy and this is where SEO maintenance comes into play. 

This blog post explores what SEO maintenance is and the importance and benefits of SEO maintenance. It also presents the best SEO maintenance practices that businesses can implement or ensure that their hired SEO companies practice these as part of their SEO maintenance services. Read to find out what SEO maintenance is.

What Is SEO Maintenance?

SEO maintenance also known as ongoing SEO is the process of ensuring that your SEO strategies are constantly changing and improving according to the updates in search engine algorithms and analyzing how the search intent of a consumer changes. It is the practice of keeping track of your website’s performance, and understanding and implementing changes to your current SEO strategy to rank high on search results and remain competitive in the industry.

Why Does SEO Maintenance Matter?

SEO maintenance is an ongoing process to build on your initial SEO efforts. Having an SEO maintenance plan is crucial because of many reasons. We have outlined the most prominent purposes of having ongoing SEO maintenance plans as part of your SEO strategy.

Changing Search Engine Algorithms

Search engine algorithms are constantly evolving to produce search results that are of higher quality to match the search intent of consumers with more clarity. This means that your website will have to meet different criteria to have higher SEO rankings and show up on search results.

Your Competitors Are Doing SEO Maintenance Too

You are limited by when you initiate your SEO strategy because the results at that time are subjective to other existing companies and how they rank on search engines. However, competitors enter the market at different periods of time, while other competitors implement ongoing SEO maintenance which reduces the likelihood of your website’s performance as your competitors improve. 

Reviewing If Your Current Approach Works

At the beginning of your SEO campaign, you would have performed extensive keyword research, dedicated time towards optimized content creation, and secured inbound links to create and implement the perfect SEO strategy. But how can check if these were effective, good SEO practices for your business with ongoing SEO maintenance plans? 

To evaluate the performance of your website’s SEO plan according to your initial goals, you need to perform SEO maintenance. Using Google Analytics and other tools you can analyze how your keywords affect your SEO rankings and the alterations you need to make to head in the right direction if your metrics don’t match the goals and expectations of your company.

Search Engines Don’t Like a Stale Website

Search engines despise outdated content and a rigid website that shows no dynamic or ongoing process or maintenance. This causes your website to gradually lose relevance, traffic, and overall engagement rates as search engine crawlers lose interest in your website. Your SEO strategy will face a dead-end if you stick to your initial SEO plan without updating your SEO practices and website content.

8 Benefits of SEO Maintenance

Now that you know why SEO maintenance services are important, here are 8 benefits that make SEO maintenance incredibly helpful for the success of your company.

Better User Experience

People have a low attention span and are always on the lookout for innovative, engaging content that is to the point. While your digital marketing might include different media formats on your site it is crucial to ensure these formats are supported to run smoothly on your website. 

Lagging elements that slow down your website create frustrating online experiences for your users and don’t show up when Google searches for optimized content and elements. Through SEO maintenance and the newly introduced core web vital report by Google, these weaknesses can be located to enhance your website, and create web pages that are easy to navigate.

Brings Higher Close Rates

Reaching out directly to consumers through digital marketing outreach methods has shown lower close rates compared to the traffic brought in through SEO practices. By ensuring your SEO maintenance is on point, you drive in traffic that is directed to your website by the results displayed to match the user’s search intent. The quality of these leads is much higher with statistics showing 12.9% more close rates than outreach efforts without SEO.

Results in Higher Conversion Rate

Consistently maintaining high rankings and showing up on the top positions of the first page of search results increase the domain authority of your website. This helps increase the credibility of your site, driving in more quality traffic resulting in higher conversion rates.

Promotes Better Cost Management

Consistent maintenance of the SEO strategy allows you to drive more quality traffic to your site, and increase lead generation at a higher rate than through outreach campaigns, which cost more. Higher authority websites also naturally rank higher and do not have to invest in pay per click or other paid tools to advertise their page.

Builds Brand Credibility

The longer the website of your business ranks high, both Google and consumers view your site as a credible source to access that can offer better services than lower-ranking competitors. This is why it is important to practice consistent ongoing SEO maintenance on a regular basis to ensure you are maximizing your efforts towards increasing or maintaining your ranks at the least.

Helps Establish Brand Awareness

SEO ensures that your business’ website is found out through organic search. A higher ranking website is always more easily shown and accessible to users which leads to more people in the industry being aware of your brand’s existence- whether competitor, consumer or someone looking for content on your business! 

Long-Term Marketing Strategy

Building a high SEO ranking site takes time, from upto at least 4-6 months. Fortunately, it takes as much as time for your website to be taken lower than its optimal ranking so a secure SEO plan is a long-term marketing strategy. 

However, you need to keep in mind that competitors and algorithms are changing, both looking to improve organic search results so its crucial you track these metrics and stay up to date. 

Improves Website Speed

Positive user online experiences begin with the speed of navigation and the time it takes to load website content. Optimizing the elements of your website helps Google see your website as a better fit to show on the organic search results that a competitor website offering similar content with lower website speed.  This lowers the bounce rate of your site and increase opportunities for lead generation.

Takes You Ahead of the Competition

One of the most important benefits of SEO is that as you rank higher, you are beating the competition. Your business is viewed as a more credible, reliable and authoritative company in the industry to both Google and consumers. 

Best Practices for SEO Maintenance

The best SEO practices are more than just researching for keywords and pushing these keywords into all your content. Apart from being a harmful practice, it is not the only way to your company to implement and maintain a successful SEO strategy. Here are the best practices you can tick as part of your SEO maintenance checklist that guarantees success!

Website Performance

Analyze your website’s performance on a regular basis, at least once a week at minimum. Google and other platforms provide analytics tools that can help understand the performance of your site better and connect it to your SEO strategy. 

You can use these valuable metrics to tweak different aspects of your website. The number of page views, conversion rate, bounce rate and any other metrics that denote the performance of your site can help you alter your business’ SEO strategy and improve the benefits of it.

Local Listings

While general SEO focuses on your overall rank from Google’s extensive network of content, a local listing helps you secure customers that are looking for local businesses in their geographic vicinity.  An effective local listing has to provide accurate and updated information from phone numbers, an address for Google Maps to ensure you are a geographically appropriate choice for consumers searching for “business near me” to providing consumers with updated details about your products and services. 

Ensuring that your information is updated regularly on your local listing allows your business to dominate local search results, and build credibility in your local community. 

Link Building

Building links from other authoritative sites is an excellent SEO practice. However it is crucial that you consistently check whether there are broken links that reduce the credibility of your website. Consistently checking if your site has broken links or redirected links through software and services available, or an SEO professional are maintenance tasks that should not be ignored. 

Fix broken links by updating them, or remove these links to ensure that link-building process is more useful than harmful to your website and business. 

Optimize Your Content

Keep track of your previous posts, and ensure that the information on there is updated according to the timeline it is being viewed at. Although the regular update of content depends on the type of business you are, and your information doesn’t necessarily have to be wrong for you to make changes to it. 

Having evergreen content is a positive trait that both Google and consumers harp on. Another excellent practice is keep tracking of your old keywords, and replacing them with new keywords that will optimize your content better. An ideal frequency to do this would be once a month.

Reevaluate UX

UX is the user experience on your site. You should go through your website at least once a month to look for web design flaws that affect user’s experience on your site. Look out for elements and content that slow your website down, broken links and pages that can increase bounce rates and lower conversion rates. Identifying and rectifying these elements that hinder a smooth and straightforward user experience are great SEO maintenance practices. 

Competitor Tracking

Competitive analysis is an important aspect of your SEO campaign. Look out for the best practices of your competitors from keywords that are ranking high for, to keywords they are under-utilizing. However, keywords are not the only factor that determines which page and position you land on. Analyze the overall website performance of your competitors, and all the initiatives they are performing and not performing. Use this information to alter your strategy to bridge the gap as you promote your products and services.

Conclusion

SEO is an essential digital marketing approach for businesses to beat their competition and rank high in search engine results. It is important for a company to have dedicated time to learn SEO maintenance practices and implement them to consistently improve your site to rank high and become an authoritative figure in your niche.

SEO maintenance practices range from optimizing your content for high-performing keywords, updating information on local listings to analyzing the overall website performance and health – from low website speeds, broken links to frustrating user experiences and tracking competitors. While your SEO approach does not need massive updates, consistent minor changes can make a huge impact on your rankings and the page your company lands on to promote its products and services.