SEO helps us climb the rankings and get to the top of Google. The thing is, it isn’t one of those things you can get right once and pat yourself on the back before moving on. Where SEO is concerned, if you snooze, you lose. One moment you’re the champion of the world, but if you take your eyes off the prize, a competitor will upstage you.
In other words, SEO is an ongoing process. Google is frequently changing its algorithms, which means that what worked a few months ago might not work anymore. What do you need to do? You need to check, revise, tweak, and adapt. How often and what do you need to check – and why? Let’s take a look!
Keywords come and go
Picking the right keywords for SEO purposes can take some time. Most people will use either Google’s free Keyword Planner or some premium SEO tools to help them find the keywords their audience is searching for.
Once you start ranking for keywords, it’s a good feeling. However, keywords can sometimes come in and out of fashion. Just because a keyword was popular in your niche last year, that doesn’t mean it will always be so.
Each time you use a keyword tool, keep track of the keywords you’ve chosen. After three months or so, return to your tool to check the average search volume of each keyword in your campaign. The search volume might be roughly the same, it might have gone up, or it might have dropped. If it’s tailed off, you’ll need to fine-tune your campaign and research for more relevant keywords that your audience is now using.
If search volume has significantly grown, you might want to move the keyword in question to a different page, such as a squeeze page for higher conversions.
Keyword campaigns should also be adjusted if your position in the SERPs drops. Monitor where you are on the SERPs each week to see whether there have been significant changes.
Title tags should change, too
If your main keywords change, it will probably have a knock-on effect on your title tags and meta descriptions. As such, each time you alter the main keywords in your content, take the time to adjust the relevant title tags and meta descriptions for the right pages, too.
Rejig old content
Many of us go all-in when it comes to creating brand new content from scratch, as we’re told that Google loves fresh content. But how many of us bother to rejig existing content?
Refreshing old content is a key part of your SEO revision efforts. Don’t get scared just yet, however, because not all of your content needs to be revisited. The best way to tell whether or not content needs rejigging is to measure how many clicks a particular post or page has received.
For example, if the content is high on clicks, it’s a good sign that Google likes it. As such, you probably don’t need to refresh it at this time. If the visits drop off, it might need an SEO makeover later on.
A makeover doesn’t mean that you need to haul in another content writer to put a shine on things. Instead, you need to focus on its on-page SEO, including its metadata and title tags. Also, consider your social media marketing efforts: Have you been pushing the article enough and in the right way? Social media is a great place to go viral and secure vital backlinks.
How often should you check your content? At least twice a month, but once a week if possible. You can use Google Analytics to check for visits or your SEO tool.
Add new content frequently
It’s always a nice feeling when we score a hit with a smooth piece of content and get to the top of the SERPs. But you can’t rest on your laurels where SEO and content are concerned. Not only should you be asking “What type of content should I post?”, but also, “How often?”
Freshness matters on Google because updates to your pages send signals to the search engines spiders to index your content again. This keeps it relevant, and it means Google’s bots are regularly dropping by your site. This is a good thing as the more it visits your site, the more it will reassess where you should be in the rankings.
How often should you be posting new content? There’s no definitive answer to the question; it all depends on the type of site you have. If you run a news site, you need to post daily. For everyone else, it’s a good idea to take a look at what your high-ranking competitors are doing. How often do they publish new posts?
The long and short of it is that, as Matt Cutts of Google points out, freshness matters. Whether this means posting new content daily or once a week, it’s important that you get stuff out there, but it’s also important that what you post is of high quality.
Remember, each time you post something new, you’ve also got a fresh chance to research and use more keywords.
Catch those bad backlinks
Backlinks help you climb the rankings by adding some crucial link juice to your site. However, if the links are spam, they could actually harm your position in the SERPs.
The easiest way to get rid of bad backlinks is to get in touch with the webmaster and kindly ask them to remove the inbound link. Once the link has been removed, you’ll then need to find an alternative replacement as the more backlinks you have, the higher you could rank.
Again, you can use your own SEO tool if you have one (provided it has a backlink tracker) or a link research tool to find out which links are good and which are bad.
The race for backlinks is heating up. Just as you’re scouring your sector for backlinks, so are your competitors. As such, there’s no time to waste where dodgy links are concerned. If you’re working hard at securing backlinks, work just as hard at checking to see how good or bad those backlinks are. I suggest revisiting this aspect of your SEO campaign at least once a week.
Summing up
Revisiting your SEO strategy doesn’t need to be hard work as long as you remember that SEO is an ongoing process. If you’ve always seen SEO as a one-off thing, checking and revising will be tedious. Change your mindset and approach, and you’ll be just dandy.
How often do you revise your SEO? Let us know in the comments below!