According to Ahrefs, over two-thirds of all online experiences start with search. It’s estimated that there are over 2.5 billion searches just on Google each day. The top three Google results get over 50% of the clicks. When you consider that SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate, the quality of leads is unquestionably worth your digital marketing investment. Needless to say, if you aren’t keeping up with some key ongoing SEO optimization activities, you could be losing valuable visitors.
What is Ongoing SEO and Why is it Important?
Ongoing SEO describes the process of keeping up to date with SEO best practices and user preferences over time. Your SEO strategy must consider where your business ranks in organic search, to remain in a strong position and attract quality leads. Not only do you need to look at the results you’re currently getting, but you also need to think about ways to adapt to new algorithms and customer behaviour in the future.
Consumer behaviour has dramatically shifted over the past few years. Although some changes stem from circumstances fueled by the pandemic, people are genuinely getting more efficient at using search to get results. As users get smarter about search, the search engines update the algorithms that determine results.
As a business owner, it’s not sufficient to create a professional, good-looking website and just hope for the best. It’s important for your website to evolve and keep pace with the demands from users and search engines, to provide quality results. Ongoing SEO activities keep your website relevant for users, and consequently, highly visible in search results.
SEO is a constant process to maximize your website’s online presence for relevant search phrases (keywords) and be visible to your customers. With ongoing SEO maintenance, you can finetune your website and content to cope with Search engines’ algorithmic changes and surpass your online competitor in search results.
On-Page Vs. Off-Page SEO
SEO encompasses a variety of methods and proven techniques to improve your search ranking. To help understand what goes into ongoing SEO maintenance, you have to look at on-page and off-page SEO.
What Is On-Page SEO?
On-page SEO refers to the elements on your website that support your SEO strategy. It improves your company’s positioning in the search results presented to your potential customers when they search for specific terms in search engines. While it certainly takes up-to-date knowledge and skill, on-page SEO can be continuously monitored and refined. This is because it is influenced by factors that you have control over, such as page content, relevancy with keywords, mobile friendliness, page load speed, headings, coding error fixes, conversion funnels, calls to action (CTA), and ultimately, the overall page experience.
What Is Off-Page SEO?
Off-page SEO is the other, equally important aspect of SEO. It involves building brand awareness and increasing online reputation to ultimately help your site get noticed by search engines. Off-page SEO includes backlinks, which are links from other websites and platforms to your website. For example, these links can be from web directories, industry-specific websites, Social Media platforms and your Google Business Profile. All these links contribute to building your website’s authority and trust. In addition, your Google Business Profile is an important component of local SEO which allows your business to rank when someone makes a location-specific search.
Ongoing SEO Activities
Search engine algorithms are highly guarded secrets and for good reason. After all, the goal is to prevent manipulation and ensure the greatest value and relevancy of search results for the end users. As a result, there are many aspects of SEO that are out of your control. All you can do is focus on what lies within your control, such as Ongoing SEO, to get a competitive edge online and rank higher than your competitors.
Let’s take a look at the items of Ongoing SEO optimization your digital marketing agency can perform to help you maintain and improve your website performance in search results.
On-Page SEO Items
Since you have the most control over on-page SEO items, keeping up with these elements of your website can be most beneficial to your SEO strategy.
1. Website Pages and Blog Content Optimization
A good SEO strategy should be supported by extensive keyword research. It includes analyzing how your pages and blogs are performing based on the selected keywords. When content isn’t performing as expected it should be revisited, updated or removed. Remember your audience and why they are searching for the keyword. Content should be written around user intent, not just keywords.
Not only do images, videos and infographics help break up long sections of text, but they can also contribute to the positioning of your content in search results. They can be optimized with tags to help search engine spiders identify your content.
Internal linking is also another way to optimize your website pages and blog content. This technique helps Google and your user navigate your website and has an impact on your website ranking.
2. Page Title, Meta Description, and URL Optimization
After content, the title tag is one of the most important elements of your website. It refers to the title the customer sees in search results that identify what the content is about. Title tags should be no longer than 60 characters.
The meta description is displayed right underneath the title tag in search results and should be optimized to show a summary of the content to encourage customers to click through.
Finally, the URL structure is one more element of on-page SEO that can be optimized to make navigation easier for users and search engines. Using a primary keyword in the URL cues in search engines and users to page content.
3. Keywords’ Performance Monitoring
One key change in how people search is the keywords they use. Keyword phrases are constantly being updated by users. Consumers are more accustomed to using voice for search, using different phrasing when searching for businesses. Fortunately, the tools to monitor how keywords are doing are also being updated to make it easier to analyze your content. There are many free keyword measuring tools that provide data you can use to finetune your SEO content.
4. Competition Monitoring
Knowing where your competition ranks in search and for which keywords can help create better content and set goals for your SEO strategy. An SEO agency will monitor your competition to identify opportunities, and sometimes even new markets, to consider. Based on the information found, they will recommend creating new pages or blog articles or updating existing content on your website.
5. User Experience Re-evaluation
Content and keywords might be among the most important elements of SEO, but if users aren’t seeing the content when and how you intended, then you’re losing clicks and conversions. When pages load slowly or when visitors can’t read your content on mobile, they won’t stick around. Checking page speed and mobile responsiveness can ensure users are getting a consistently good experience when they visit your site. Google monitors user experience. When users are unhappy with your page, Google knows and it affects your ranking.
6. New Content Creation
Users want to see fresh content that shows your business is up to date. Search engines want to know that your website has new content, demonstrating relevancy. Modern consumers want to engage meaningfully with brands and businesses.
Interactive content is a great way to connect with your audience while generating leads. Content creation can be in the form of blogs, videos, case studies, infographics, etc. Blogging gives companies an edge over their competitors who do not provide regularly updated content. Companies that refresh their content regularly, enjoy the following key benefits:
- Have 97% more inbound links
- Generate 126% more leads
- Get 434% more indexed pages
Not surprisingly, more than two-thirds of customers would rather read content about a product than see an ad. New content is an effective way to build an ongoing relationship with your customer. Content Marketing should play a key role in any ongoing SEO initiatives.
Technical SEO Items
Technical SEO is another important element to include in your ongoing SEO activities. Technical SEO is often overlooked because it’s working behind the scenes. Technical SEO includes unseen elements that optimize your website for search engine bots to index your information. Here are some of them.
7. Website Performance Monitoring and Improvement
No matter how impressive your website looks, if no one can find it, it’s a wasted investment. Search engines rely on technical data to index the pages of your website and to understand how well they perform. As part of that mission, search engines take into account how long pages take to load, how accessible it is, the responsiveness of the page under different platforms, and the security of the site. Checking this information regularly can help keep your website functioning at its best.
8. Indexing Error Identification and Resolution
Websites can have dozens or even hundreds of pages. Therefore, it is important that all pages on your site are indexed to allow them to contribute to your website’s ranking in search results. Pages with errors can negatively affect your SEO efforts.
Errors can be found by logging into your Google Search Console. There are many types of errors ranging from redirect errors to URL and server errors. Fixing these issues can improve your site’s visibility.
9. Toxic Link Removal
Search engines use backlinks to identify the authority of your site. Backlinks are links from other sites to your site. When the site that links to you doesn’t have anything to do with your business, it can actually hurt your own ranking in search. These low-quality links create an artificial authority back to you and can damage your online reputation.
In 2012, Google rolled out the Penguin update, which rewarded high-quality websites that didn’t engage in manipulative link schemes. If you use negative backlink building practices, it will hurt your rankings in search.
10. Mobile Responsiveness Verification
With so many different operating systems and screen sizes, users may not be able to view your site effectively. Google indexes your mobile site first, so it is important that the site be fully responsive. You can easily test the mobile friendliness of your site through Google Search Console. A good digital marketing agency can help you identify and fix pages with mobile responsiveness issues.
Off-page SEO Items
Off-page SEO strategies can support your on-page SEO efforts. Off-page SEO works more effectively once your on-page SEO is working the right way and producing the desired results. Here are a few elements of off-page SEO to incorporate into your ongoing SEO activities.
11. Link and Backlink Building
As mentioned earlier, backlinks, also called backlinks or inbound links, are links from other websites or platforms to yours. These links are used to indicate to Google that your business is trustworthy and that the content on the site is relevant, credible and useful to its users.
You cannot buy backlinks. Therefore, it is important to publish valuable and authoritative content that people can link to. By monitoring backlinks, it is possible to assess what content is considered valuable and gauge where your traffic is coming from. Publishing articles in industry-specific magazines, making sure you have company profiles on relevant industry directories, and creating press releases are just a few ways to generate valuable backlinks.
12. GBP Profile Optimization and Management
Some studies estimate that around 56% of businesses have not claimed their Google Business Profile (GBP), but over two-thirds of consumers use the GBP to get up-to-date information about a business. Your GBP is an important part of your business discoverability in search. While it is too minimalistic an approach, you can attract local buyers to your business without even a website, just by keeping your information in GBP up to date.
13. Social Media Posting
Social media doesn’t directly go into the search engine algorithms to increase your search rankings, but you can use social media to distribute content to your followers. As users consume content on your site, it improves your online presence. Sharing content on social media enhances your brand recognition and gives your customers a way to interact with your business.
Leverage Ongoing SEO Activities to Grow Your Digital Presence
Wouldn’t it be convenient if you could simply put your website optimization on autopilot? Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Monitoring user behavior and SEO elements of your website can help you stay ahead of your competition.
While it’s true that search engines don’t engage or buy products and services, the people that do, find their way to your business via the search engines. This is the reality of today’s times and will remain this way. As users rely on the internet to find information and make purchases, having a strong SEO strategy keeps you relevant and ahead of your competitors.
WSI Montreal is a digital marketing agency specializing in SEO. We can help you improve your company’s website ranking through effective and proven SEO strategies to ultimately generate more leads. Contact us to learn more about our SEO services in Montreal and local SEO services.
