Those who have no in-depth understanding of SEO think that, after implementing a campaign or strategy, work is done and all that’s left to do is wait for the results. This is not true! Consistently ranking on search engines and reaping the positive impact of optimising a website require hard work. To be more precise, it demands regular maintenance. This is one of the biggest reasons why website optimisation is said to be complicated and time-consuming.

Why is SEO maintenance necessary? You need to know if your strategies are working or not. While it takes months to see the significant SEO results, this doesn’t mean that there’s nothing you can do until the waiting period is over. For one, you can use your analytics tool to have an idea how you are doing so far.

Another reason why SEO requires regular monitoring is that search engines always tweak their algorithms. You need to keep up with these changes or your site can get penalised and suffer a drop in rankings. So, if you think that SEO is a fixed science, you are wrong! This field is constantly evolving – a strategy that is working now may no longer be effective after a few months. Hence, you have to adapt quickly or be left out.

Simply put, the absence of regular SEO maintenance can result in a significant dip in your rankings. When this happens, you don’t just lose traffic but also revenues. You cannot let this happen! If you want to keep your good position on search engine result pages (SERPs), create a maintenance plan and commit to implementing it. Be forewarned, though, that this task can be very laborious. If you cannot consistently perform the required SEO maintenance tasks, it is best to hire an expert who can do it.

What do you exactly do to ensure that your website keeps or improves its position on SERPs? Below is an SEO maintenance guide which lists the tasks you need to accomplish weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly.

Weekly SEO Tasks

Review your performance metrics: Find out how your site is doing based on the following metrics – number of visitors, page load time, keyword performance and volume of leads and sales. Doing this enables you to identify and correct issues before they cause major problems. It is okay to do this task weekly, but it’s best if you can do it everyday.

Update your website’s content: You’ve probably already heard that search engines love fresh content. Publishing new content regularly is necessary to stay at the top of SERPs. One good way of satisfying this requirement is to write blogs. This strategy allows you to hit two birds with one stone – produce new content and use what’s currently the top keywords. When you have a new website, publishing a blog or two a day is highly recommended. However, if you can’t do this, strive to post at least one each week.

Ensure that your new pages are SEO-compliant: Your efforts to produce new content will be for naught if it doesn’t comply with the requirements of search engines. As much as possible, check the SEO compliance of the page before publishing it. Also see to it that these new pages are submitted to search engines. When this task, called search engine submission, is not accomplished, your new pages will not be crawled and indexed.

Monitor your competitors: Check their websites and take note of any changes. Run search queries and find out what their rank is for certain keywords. Knowing what your competitors are doing and how they are fairing is necessary if you want to outperform them.

Read SEO articles: As mentioned earlier, there’s always something new in the SEO industry. Missing updates can have dire consequences on your optimisation efforts. Hence, you need to stay abreast of any developments in this field so you can immediately incorporate them into your current strategy.

Need help with your SEO maintenance tasks? Our reputable SEO consultants can do it for you! Talk to them now – call us at 019609023!

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