Anyone who has built and launched a website has likely encountered an oft-repeated acronym: SEO (search engine optimization). And while you might not have ever done SEO yourself, you've benefited from it in the past: Every day, search engines like Google employ complex algorithms to sift through more than 400 billion web pages and deliver the most relevant results.

Website owners like you use SEO techniques and strategies to get their websites to the top of the search results for relevant user queries. But SEO is not a one-time endeavor — Google and other search engines change often, and ongoing SEO ensures your website stays in front of the people you want to reach. Just as a physical storefront requires regular maintenance and updates to stay competitive, your website needs ongoing SEO to remain visible amidst the ever-changing digital landscape.

The ABCs of SEO: What is Ongoing SEO and Why Does It Matter?

Don't let the techy jargon intimidate you. HubSpot — considered one of the gold standards for SEO and digital marketing advice — defines SEO as simply a collection of strategies and tips that "expand a company’s visibility in organic search results'' and help "drive more visitors to the company’s website, increasing their chances for more conversions which leads to more customers and more revenue."

SEO Connects the Search Engine Algorithms With Your Website's Content

Regardless of your website's goal or industry niche, all SEO techniques have one thing in common: They look at ways to optimize your website's content, keywords, and links to help search engines rank your website higher in the search results when someone searches for something related to your keywords, content, or brand name.

According to HubSpot, SEO needs to address the key factors that all search engines use to determine the value of your website's content — and therefore how high in the search results your website or specific landing page should appear:

The intent or meaning behind why someone is searching for a specific term or question
The relevance between what someone searches for, and the content on your website
The quality of your content (for instance, a website about physical exercise written by certified personal trainers is deemed by Google to be higher quality than a website where the articles are written by non-experts)
The performance of your website, such as how long it takes a page to load and whether it works well on mobile devices

Static SEO Versus Ongoing SEO: Why It Matters to Stay Fresh and Keep Your SEO Updates Current

As users' web behavior changes and technology evolves, search engines proactively adjust their algorithms.

If you aren't conducting ongoing SEO maintenance and upgrades, a well-optimized website today can quickly become obsolete tomorrow, causing your search rankings to drop and attracting fewer organic visitors. Google itself updates its algorithms several thousand times per year, including significant "major" changes every few months that dramatically change how it crawls and ranks content. For example, Google's infamous Panda update changed how it ranked how-to lifestyle content on the Internet, causing one major content publisher to lose a whopping $6.4 million of traffic and advertising nearly overnight.

How Ongoing SEO Influences Your Website Strategy

Staying abreast of changes to SEO techniques and strategies provides important guidance to your content, marketing, and overarching website strategy. For example, it can dictate or influence:

How much content you publish, and the content's format, length, and focus
How you incorporate other forms of media on your website, including images, video, and audio
How you organize content on your site, including landing page layouts and your site's navigation
What keywords and target users your website focuses on

Embrace the Power of Ongoing SEO

Caroline Forsey, an expert in thought leadership and marketing content, looked at the survey results from more than 400 of the world's leading web analysts to predict the biggest SEO trends of 2024. According to her data, some of the top changes in SEO strategies this year include:

A heavier emphasis on expertise, meaning the content on your website should come from experts in your related field (including bylines and author bios that demonstrate the author's credentials and experience on the topic they're writing about)
A renewed emphasis on first-person, credible content, especially as more websites generate high volumes of low-quality AI content (Google itself has announced upcoming changes to tackle low-value articles created by AI)
A priority on websites that are deemed trustworthy, such as e-commerce sites with well-rated customer service, or content sites that do a good job of citing trustworthy research and statistics
Bonus points on content that is creative and original and doesn't simply rehash content found on other sites

Of course, these SEO trends will inevitably change every year, and ongoing SEO will keep you competitive no matter what Google, Bing, and other search engines do. No matter your website's industry or content strategy, ongoing SEO requires that you:

Focus on keeping your content fresh and high quality, including new blog posts or regularly refreshing and updating old product descriptions or articles
Conduct keyword research often, since the terms or phrases that your core audience uses will evolve over time
Maintain your website's overarching performance, such as mobile-friendliness as mobile devices evolve, and page load speed
Build a diverse portfolio of high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites within your niche, which may include outreach campaigns, getting others in your industry to write guest blogs, and participating in online forums or communities
Keep on top of technical and performance metrics, such as scanning your site for broken links (and fixing the links you uncover) and using tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track organic traffic, keyword rankings, click-through rates, and conversion rates
Stay on top of algorithm changes so you can adapt your SEO strategy in real-time

Some website owners think of SEO as the first step of their promotional strategy. But it's less a first step, and more an ongoing journey to ensure you, your brand, and your content stay relevant in such a competitive atmosphere. Whether you choose to go it alone and take a DIY approach to SEO, or you choose to consult with a digital marketing and SEO agency, check in often and make sure your SEO evolves as the world around you evolves.

3/10/21, 10:43 AM

We’re regularly advised to deep clean our homes (especially come Spring), but have you ever considered deep cleaning your website? While it might not be susceptible to the usual dirt and grime, your website has no doubt gathered some digital dust bunnies and clutter over the years.

Deep cleaning your website might sound like a big undertaking, but don’t worry – we’ve outlined each of the necessary steps in this guide to help you get started.

Firstly, why should you deep clean your website?

Remember those digital dust bunnies we mentioned? Well, they take the form of broken links, outdated SEO tactics, keyword stuffing, too-large file sizes, and more. While these issues may seem harmless, they can actually cause your website all sorts of damage, including low Search Engine rankings, slow page loading times, far fewer website traffic, and as a result, potentially fewer customers and income than you hope for.

1. Be on the lookout for keyword stuffing

There’s no doubt you want your website to rank for particular keywords relating to your business. But here’s the thing: ‘stuffing’ your website with the same keywords over and over again, in the hopes of gaining an unfair SEO advantage, can push you further down in the search engine results pages (SERPS).

To avoid this penalty, make sure you haven’t:

Unnecessarily repeated words or phrases
Added keywords to sections where they are out of context
Used keywords where they aren’t relevant
Inserted row after row of the same keyword

As a general rule, your chosen keyword(s) should only appear within 2% of the webpage’s text. To see whether your keyword density is within this threshold, calculate:

(Number of words in copy) / (Number of times keyword appears in copy).

2. Optimize your content

Once you’ve ensured your website isn’t a culprit of keyword stuffing, it’s also vital that an SEO Audit is performed on your existing content to ensure it’s properly optimized. Ensure that you:

Have determined a list of relevant primary, secondary, and LSI keywords that you focus on within your content (LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords are terms and phrases that are similar or related to a web page's target keyword. Their purpose is to help search engines better understand the content of the page by adding context and connecting the copy to the target keyword)
Use a combination of short and long-tail keywords
Include the webpage’s main keyword in the URL, title tag, image alt tags, meta description, and headings and sub-headings where possible
Link out to trusted websites where relevant (external links)
Link to your own related content where helpful (internal links)
Test all links to make sure they’re not broken and redirect viewers to the intended site

We also recommend that you pay attention to your website’s readability. Ensure that it contains:

Short paragraphs
Excellent spelling and grammar
Simple language
Imagery to break up the text
Bullet points and lists
Headings and sub-headings
An easy-to-read font and text color

3. Discover new relevant keywords

Like many things, keywords also experience rises and falls in popularity. Rather than optimizing your content for the same keywords each year, ensure you’re seeking out new and relevant keywords to include in your content.

Some of our favorite free tools for discovering new keywords include:

The Google “Suggest” feature
Ahref’s Keyword Generator
Answer the Public

4. Reassess your linking strategies, both internally and externally

Internal links direct viewers to other relevant pages on your website. They help increase the amount of time a visitor spends on your website (therefore reducing bounce rate) and also signal to Search Engines that you have other interesting content worth checking out.

External links, on the other hand, direct your viewers to other websites where helpful and relevant. For example, if you quote research within your content, you should back-up the claims by linking to your source. The quality of these external links can help to boost your own SEO score, so make sure you’re only linking out to high-authority and trusted sites (like those ending in .gov or .edu, for example).

5. Minimize file sizes

If your website contains large file sizes (such as multimedia), then they may cause the site to load slowly for visitors, therefore encouraging them to click away and onto a competitor’s site.

Avoid this issue by compressing any larger file sizes or by saving them in a different quality or format.

6. Identify and fix website errors

There's a long list of website errors that may occur to a website at any time, yet the best way to identify and work towards fixing these is through Google’s free Search Console. It helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site's presence in Google Search results, allowing you to keep on top of any errors that may arise.

Need some assistance deep cleaning your website or have any additional questions regarding this topic? We’re here to help, so please contact us today.

Hokuyo

AccruePartners

A Guide to Deep Cleaning Your Website