Ongoing SEO: 6 Areas Where Sustained SEO Leads To Success

In my previous post about ongoing SEO vs “SEO-ready” sites I only had a short-ish section about why SEO is a task that is never really over (the exception being perhaps if you are doing SEO for marketing campaigns, more on that another time). Here I’m going to add a bit more detail on why SEO should always be ongoing. Not saying you need to constantly throw the same amount of resource at it, but there are a number of reasons it should never really be forgotten about.

In the linked post I talked about a few bullet points that are usually part of ongoing SEO efforts. These were:

• Keyword research
• On-page optimisation
• Link building
• Content creation
• Monitoring and reporting
• Tech SEO

Admittedly, some of these aspects can and should be done before a site is live — such as thinking about keyword research, site speed, and how to avoid show-stopping technical problems (such as gateway pages or single page websites). But even these are not guaranteed when you get what might otherwise be a very pretty, functional site judged by other means. So I’m revisiting the topic of ongoing SEO to explain in more detail why people should take this to be the standard definition of SEO, i.e. SEO done properly is ongoing SEO. There’s a caveat around doing SEO for marketing campaigns, but that’s for another time.

Ongoing keyword research keeps you relevant

Technically, keywords are things that we target, and search queries are the things that people type that we try to capture with the keywords that we target. The reason keyword research is part of ongoing SEO efforts is that how people search, i.e. the mix of queries that they use, is constantly changing. Take this example from good old Google Trends, that relates to the mobile broadband industry over the years:

Here we can clearly see that once people were aware of a concept called “mobile broadband”, shortly they became enlightened about the main way to get access to it which was at one point a USB device called a “dongle” (also used for other things hence the search interest going into 2010). Over time the awareness of a device called a “hotspot” which enabled more than 1 device to get access become more popular, and after “tethering” was made a thing on mobile phones, “hotspot” was co-opted by phone manufacturers to refer to tethering and has now come out on top. The point I’m making is that if you optimised pages for “mobile broadband” because you were reviewing it, selling it, discussing it etc., then if you only did your keyword research once, you would not be in a good place right now. This is because of the following things changing:

• How people search
• This is affected by what people are aware of
• This is affected by marketing campaigns (including your competitors)
• This is affected by what is actually out there as a product
• And this is likely affected by how business have responded to perceived needs or trends

Keyword research belongs as part of ongoing SEO efforts because it is a mirror on the world, which is always changing. This is really the jumping off point to many of the section below, because in doing ongoing keyword research you will discover areas that you have simply not got covered yet, or those that might need additional prioritisation because they have suddenly become the leading terms in your niche or vertical.

Regular on-page optimisation is like an MOT for your website

On-page optimisation covers a number of different aspects of dealing with content on your site. This can include (but is not limited to):

• tweaking copy or metadata to reflect those keywords that have now become more important
• working on internal linking structure to emphasise your important pages
• updating pages that have out of date content due to changes in your offering
• updating pages that have out of date content due to changes in the world
• checking sources like Search Console to see what you are appearing but are not ranking highly enough to get clicks

You get the idea. Even if you make no new content because your offering as a business never changes, you should be at least updating what you have because it’s highly likely that there are long-tail keywords or new keywords to target, and in a general sense, it’s likely that users themselves might respond to content that is re-worked to reflect the current trends.

Linkbuilding and backlink monitoring: in with the good, out with the bad

Linkbuilding can be a legitimate and crucial part of SEO. I don’t mean paying for someone to make thousands of links on faraway and spammy blogs, I mean a measured approach to planning your content and its potential backlink sources based on a target audience (that may well not be the same as your actual customers). You might get lucky and exist in a niche where a few good links will help you rank for years, but if it’s even slightly competitive, then you are likely competing with businesses that are constantly thinking this way, so it’s easy to fall behind. That’s why thinking about your content and linkbuilding strategy should also be an ongoing SEO task.

Monitoring your backlink profile (and comparing to that of your competitors) is the post hoc act of looking at how your links are evolving over time, not just in number but in quality. There are a number of reasons this is important to review regularly:

• Sites that you have previously obtained links from can fall from grace (or, you may unwittingly get links from dodgy sites, or have mistakenly paid for this service in the past). You need to find out about these to get rid of them
• Links can disappear when sites redesign things or migrate to new systems — it can be worthwhile to try and get them back
• New sites come in that you might want to have as link targets
• Your site itself might change is such a way that old links now point to effectively dead or defunct URLs
• Your competitors are likely doing all of this!

It’s true that really excellent content might gain links without much effort, but you still need to be monitoring your backlink profile, links going to 404s etc. to make sure that (a) you are not falling behind and that (b) you are cleaning up or reinstating old links.

Content creation

When you make new content it doesn’t have to be for SEO, in fact it probably shouldn’t — users first, right? That doesn’t mean that you can’t do keyword research or think about how new content can be linked to existing content to either beef up internal links or test long tail keywords. But if you are trying to improve your site’s SEO, then you should be looking at the outputs of your keyword research and thinking how to get the most out of that per se.

As stated above, the way that people search is constantly changing for a number of reasons, mostly covered by “the world that they find themselves in”. That has a few knock-on effects on how you should create that content. How people consume media content may be changing — think about formats, tone, length, and the users’ intent when you make new content. In the news publishing world for example, there has long been a trend towards combining different formants, and the inclusion of summaries/bullet lists that help users to get the basic facts more easily.

Creating regular new content shows that your brand is alive, as part of an ongoing SEO approach it shows search engines that the site is fresh, and it’s a great way to test out some of the theories coming out of your keyword research (tip: if it’s less disruptive to start with a blog post than a dedicated page that requires designing and incorporating in your navigation etc., try that out first and see if it gets any more or less traction than other posts).

If you don’t make new content, you won’t know what areas you’re missing out on, so you should be doing this on a regular basis. What does regular mean? That depends on a lot of things — your competitor set, your niche, but mainly the resources you have available — but always focus on quality, detailed content that effectively provides what users need.

Monitoring and reporting

The amount of data being collected about websites that just sits there doing nothing is staggering! There is so much that you can gain from regularly reviewing sources of ongoing SEO data. Here are just a few that are free or have freemium options:

Depending on the size of your business, you may or may not have someone to dig through all of this for you. You don’t need to be a data analyst to do it, because most of the above tools have fairly comprehensive documentation and there’s loads of help available around the web. You might need some help implementing web analytics tools correctly depending on what you want to find out, but most developers can help with that and if you’re using WordPress there will be plugins too (although you are unlikely to get the most bespoke and powerful setup without using an expert).

Nevertheless, you can find out lots about your site and your market by digging through some of the above tools. Web analytics can tell you where traffic is landing from organic search (and if you have GA and link it to Search Console, it can bring in keyword data). The various SEO tools can give you a view of what you and competitors are up to in terms of visibility, content and keyword focus. By poring over some of this data, you should be able to at least figure out the basics of:

• what you’re doing that’s working and do more
• what competitors are doing that you aren’t and emulate it

If you’re lucky and have time, you may even be able to come up with new ideas that fuse where you want to go as a business with where the trends seem to be headed, e.g. mining an early emerging trend in the market, or noticing attention that you are getting for something that was a test or secondary focus.

Technical SEO: constantly moving goalposts

As if it wasn’t enough that people are fickle (how dare they change what they need in response to the economy and society?!) the search engines themselves. Google’s recent history of their updates since January 2020 includes 33 updates they felt necessary to share with webmasters. Behind the scenes though, there is much more going on, because search engines are sitting on what is itself a constantly changing network graph containing trillions of datapoints. Even if they don’t have a major update, the context in which your site sits is changing.

In addition to updates in search engine algorithms, there are changes in the standards on which the web is built. This is usually in response to changes in the technology used to browse the web. One set of “standards” (more like strong guidelines) is Core Web Vitals which has been around a few years, and aims to improve user experience on the web, especially with respect to page loading speed and mobile experience, given that the internet is mostly browsed on mobile networks and devices and has been for some time. You may note from the link that CWV itself has had 3 major updates announced during this time.

CWV — broadly page speed and user experience — are reported to be a factor in search engine rankings, so if your site was built 10 years ago and works on desktop but is unusable on a phone or tablet, it’s likely to have poor search engine visibility. If it takes ages to load because it relied on a broadband connection due to the size of the images used, it needs looking at.

A good technical SEO audit can help you to discover these problems, and might stand you in good stead for a year or more, but it’s best to have this side of things reviewed on a quarterly basis as part of an ongoing SEO strategy due to the frequency of changes in search engine algorithms and technology. As a benefit, a good tech SEO report will also tell you about things like broken internal links, large pages, missing metadata, redirects that need fixing, and much more.

Ongoing SEO is just SEO

Lots of writers will begin their posts with a dictionary definition as a jumping off point. I’m going to finish one that hopefully underlines the point that I’ve been making all along. The Cambridge Dictionary says that optimisation is this:

the act of making something as good as possible

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/optimization

If that’s true, then since the world in which we operate is always changing, what was good once might not be so good today because people, competitors or search engines have moved on. That means the “optimisation” in “search engine optimisation” necessarily implies ongoing SEO should be the default approach.