SEO Is Never Done. Here’s Why.
Estimated Reading Time: 4 Minutes
By: Brian McCracken
High Level Developer
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KEY
POINTS
- SEO is a faced-paced, evolving part of your digital presence online.
- Your competition will always be attempting to outrank you to earn more business, potentially at your cost.
- SEO is something that needs to be worked on over time, and shouldn’t be stopped and starting as you might do with other marketing tools and methodologies.
Many business owners I’ve spoken to expect that SEO is a one-time thing they do to their site and then never have to do again.
Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.
SEO is a continuous process. Once people start seeing results, they tend to reduce their SEO efforts, and they are the beginning of the end for them, unfortunately.
There is always room for improvement, and if you are in a highly competitive market, that’s even more true. There are always more keywords, better content, code and image optimizations, predictive search, and the list goes on.
Let’s take a closer look.
Search Engines Change And Evolve Over Time
Some changes are small. Some are much larger and significant in nature. Some examples would be:
Panda and Penguin Updates: Panda reduced the ranking of sites with poor content, while Penguin reduced the rankings of sites with questionable backlink profiles. Those two updates changed the face of SEO when they were released.
Hummingbird was an update that considered a user’s intent. Gone were the days of matching one keyword for one article. Now you had to do a better job of being complete and informative with your content, and have it match what people really wanted to see.
Pigeon changed the face of local SEO when it launched, and it’s effects are still be worked through today.
The Helpful Content update just rolled out, and with it, cheap content farms became much harder to run and benefit from. What you have to say and the quality of the content you produce matter now more than ever.
You Need New Content & It Needs Optimized
To stay relevant, you will need to publish new content for your website or update existing content.
Unfortunately, it’s not enough just to write it. You must optimize it to gain organic traffic and reach more customers.
Content Optimization is the process of:
- Finding topics your customers care about.
- Creating great content around those topics.
- Implementing SEO best practices on that content.
- Improving the content you’ve already created to include and promote your ideal business objectives.
Search Intent Changes Over Time
You might not consider this, but search intent can change very frequently. In fact, it can change by the season in some cases!
A busy hotel by a beach might have certain content focused around the summer crowds that changes to topics like “Cozy, fast gateways” during the colder months for instance.
Effective SEO Compliments All Other Marketing Strategies
A lot of people tend to think of SEO as being exclusionary of everything else in marketing.
That tends to happen because SEO requires a highly specialized set of skills that you won’t find taught in any college class on the planet, but it’s a mistake.
Consider this for a moment. If you run PPC, or buy ad space, or participate in a conference or trade show, people may need to find you online after the fact.
The better your SEO is, the easier it will be for those people to find you.
The bottom line is that SEO improves the ROI of every other marketing effort you engage in.
Your Competitors Will Never Stop Being Competitors
Effective SEO takes time. Your competition understands this. They’ve probably hired someone to manage their SEO who is always testing new ideas and strategies.
With effective SEO, there’s constant tweaking, adjustments, optimizations, and as search engines evolve, they will evolve their sites with them.
If you don’t stay on topic of your SEO efforts, you are giving your competitors the opportunity to outrank you and take your customers from you.
SEO isn’t instantaneous. You can’t simply turn it on and off.
Once you start working on your website’s SEO, it may take 6, 12, 18, 24 months, or longer to gain traction depending on how competitive your field is. If you stop and decide to pick it back up later – it’s going to take a long time to gain the traction back that you should have had all along.
Does Your SEO Need Some Work?
We can confidently say we have one of the most experienced SEO teams in Northeast Ohio and would be happy to take a closer look at your site to see what can be improved.
