There are many reasons why you should continuously invest in ongoing SEO, even if your new website is performing well. Our team of SEO & PR experts explores these in more depth below.
Ongoing review of analytics
Websites should grow and change as your business or target audience evolves over time. An analytics tool such as Google Analytics, or Microsoft Clarity helps you get more insight into the journey your website visitor takes, as this often changes from when your website first launches. Tools like these also help you understand vital information such as:
- Pain points, such as on checkout pages
- Demographics of your target audience
- The pages that are doing well / not so well
- Session duration or exit pages
By not reviewing your analytics regularly, you are limiting how well your website can perform for you and your business. For example, your customer may be leaving your site as soon as they reach the checkout page. Without reviewing your analytics, you may assume you have low sales, but in reality, there could be a bug that needs fixing or content that could be re-written to appeal more to the website user.
SEO & Digital PR - link building
If you have read our article on why digital PR is important in SEO, you will know the importance of backlinks to your website rankings. Digital PR is an online marketing strategy that combines the development of creating unique content, with outreach to bloggers and journalists, to get coverage, and gain backlinks from relevant websites.
While digital PR is a big part of SEO, it is most effective when done consistently, over a long period of time. To remain relevant to both search engines and human beings alike, you need to regularly acquire fresh links for your website. Fresh links create exposure to new audiences and signal continuing engagement to search engines.
Here are a few of the ways you can generate links for your site:
- Thought leadership and opinion articles
- Hero content campaigns
- Data or insights led PR stories
- Newsworthy company announcements or launches
- Multimedia led PR pitches
- Online PR stunts / Newsjacking (a good example of this is the Heinz-Weetabix viral Twitter campaign) – although social media won’t directly correlate to links, a viral campaign will often get covered by news websites, which will generate the backlinks
- Reviews
- Press releases
Keeping up to date with important algorithm updates
As marketers, our team is well aware of just how often Google changes its algorithms, to keep up with the changes in customer behaviours and technological advancements. According to Moz, Google changes its search algorithm approximately 500-600 times each year.
Meeting those algorithmic requirements can include anything from minor on-page or content edits to a shift in how you approach the optimisation of your entire website.
Without regularly reviewing your website's SEO to ensure you are complying with search engine algorithm changes, you could seriously harm your website rankings. This could result in a decrease in website visitors and therefore affect sales and leads.
A big algorithm change that we saw recently was Google’s Mobile-First Indexing. We saw many businesses that didn’t optimise their site for mobile and were therefore negatively impacted. Our SEO team is always ahead of algorithm changes and updates, so our clients had peace of mind that they would be not be negatively affected, even when times were volatile.
You can check how well your website is performing against the latest algorithms by conducting a FREE website audit – get in touch for yours.
Stream of fresh content
There are many benefits to regularly updating your website with fresh content. The obvious one being that it captures your audience’s attention, and also their loyalty. You give them a reason to visit your website repeatedly.
Search engines love regular new content. All of the major search engines rely on bots or web crawlers to identify and index any newly-shared content that can be included in the search results.
Not only that, but when you publish new, engaging content regularly, you create opportunities to utilise organic keyword optimization that will be rewarded with improved positions in the search results.
Your competition is doing it!
Competing for online visibility is a tough game, and everyone wants to come out on top. You may think that the SEO implemented on your website pre-launch will see you through the next few years, however, that is not always the case. SEO practices such as link building, fresh content, and ongoing optimisation will all help you climb the rankings – all things your competitors are doing right now.
They will earn the advantage in search results as they develop content, optimise metadata and continue to implement best practices on both the front and back end of their website. If your competition starts ranking for keywords that you used to rank for then changes need to be made. This is where ongoing SEO comes in to keep you ahead of your competition.
Get expert help
Ongoing SEO is incredibly important, not only for search engine rankings, but also for engaging your website visitors. Limiting yourself to a one-time SEO fix could limit the volume of traffic your website can get, which could negatively impact sales.
Our award-winning agency is a Google Partner, and offers valuable SEO support to our clients around the world. You can read about how we got one of our clients ranking in the top two positions for international search terms on our website. Want our help? If you have any questions, or to explore how SEO could impact your business growth strategy, get in touch with our SEO & PR team today.
