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5 Reasons Continuous SEO Maintenance is Important

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Most marketers believe that SEO provides the biggest ROI compared to any other strategy. Yet, ranking well on search engines illustrates how competitive and difficult SEO can be. Nearly 70 percent of all clicks for a query-based search go to the top five organic results. Ouch.

It is estimated that close to 90 percent of all content made for SEO purposes, in fact, does not receive any organic traffic. Double ouch.

While SEO does not present marketers with an upfront cost like a PPC campaign, it arguably requires a bigger investment due to time. It is not a set it and forget it method. Instead, SEO requires constant monitoring and maintenance — from updating content to fixing redirects, specialists are tasked with keeping a pulse on all campaigns and site status.

But when done right, businesses that focus on the livelihood of SEO, see the direct impact it can carry in regards to brand awareness, audience engagement, and sales figures. Here are five quick reasons you MUST prioritize SEO maintenance!

Search Engine Updates

Google and Bing are constantly tinkering and adjusting their algorithm. In 2018, Google reported making over 3,000 updates. While many of these updates may be small in scale, they can still impact SEO rankings. But every year, platforms like Google and Bing unroll large changes to their search engine that realign various factors when determining SEO value and importance to the algorithm.

In 2019, BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) was an update made to Google’s platform that was aimed to better understand user search query intent. The change altered SEO rankings and featured snippets, and caused most businesses to adjust their SEO habits.

New Content From Competitors

Content creation goes hand-in-hand with SEO. You can’t have one without the other. An ideal SEO strategy identifies a keyword or phrases that would benefit a company if they could draw some of the associated online traffic. An angle is developed, and then high-quality content is created to satisfy the user’s search-based query. The content is placed on the web, and soon it is ranked by Google on the result pages. However, competitors analyze current content and aim to produce their own versions that will outperform currently high ranking material. In doing so, your content can be pushed down the results page if it is not monitored and optimized.

Consumer Trends Change

Google receives over 75,000 searches PER SECOND. Consumer trends are fluid and ever-evolving. Take the current news cycle for example — COVID-19. Coronavirus is a pandemic sweep across the globe, with no vaccine or true treatment available. The vast majority of searches by users in the midst of this are looking for new guidelines for safety and updates regarding the disease containment.

However, a year from now, user queries are going to have a different intent. Maybe it is historical data collection or knowledge of how the vaccine kills the virus. Either way, this shows how SEO rankings are dependant upon what type of information or content users are looking to acquire. If consumer trends change the intent of a keyword, then content needs to also follow suit.  

Things Break

Links break. 404 errors occur. Images don’t load. The technical side of SEO requires a fresh coat of paint often. Websites are finicky and usage causes things to malfunction. These page errors are a black mark that Google weighs when ranking pages. Therefore, it is important to always keep an eye on the backend side of your SEO workings.

Recent is Good

Lastly, recent SEO updates to your website and campaigns show consumers you are concerned with providing the most up-to-date, accurate information and positive user experience. Recent SEO maintenance is also favored by search engine algorithms, as it signals you’re a real business concerned with focusing on the “health” of your website.

Need Help with Your SEO?

At Venta Marketing, we are helping businesses meet their goals head-on. As leaders in the digital marketing industry, we know the ins-and-outs of what makes up a good marketing strategy. Contact us if you are curious about how we can help you grow!