Search Engine Optimization Maintenance Service

A search engine optimization maintenance service plan will ensure that your site will continue to increase in its rankings, attract more visitors and make more sales. It’s not enough to simply design your web site, have it optimized for the search engines and expect it to continually rank well. If left alone, you may soon lose the business your web site initially generated.

What should be included in a SEO maintenance service plan?

1. Monitor search engine rankings - there will be many fluctuations in your search engine rankings. This may be due to search engines changing their ranking formulas, or competitors trying to get ahead of you. More sites are added to the web each day so you need to monitor your search engine rankings to be competitive. I create monthly ranking reports on where your site is currently ranked for each of the major search engines.

2. Traffic Tracking - it’s essential to know where most of your traffic is coming from so you can make adjustments to your marketing strategies. For example if most of your traffic is coming from one particular page, you may want to place your best products on that page to get more sales. I analyze your site statistics  to check how much traffic you are receiving, where is it coming from and what keywords are being used to find your site.

3. Keyword research - web sites are being added to the web every day, therefore keywords that once got high rankings may no longer work. You may have high search engine positions for your most important keyword phrases but if you are not receiving any traffic from those phrases, you will need to evaluate the keywords that you have used. Attaining a number 1 ranking for keywords that no one will search for, will not increase your traffic.

Researching new keywords is essential to maintain good rankings. I analyze the current keywords used on your site and research and add new ones. Once the keywords have been chosen, the content should be updated to reflect them. This may include subtle changes to the meta tags, page titles and text headings; or it could involve adding additional sections to the site, rewriting content and reorganizing the web site’s structure. It all depends on the specific requirements of the site and market.

4. Competitive analysis - an integral part of search engine optimization is determining what keywords your competitors are using. I analyze where your competitors are currently ranked for the same keywords you are using for your web pages. I also check how many competitors you have for each of the major search engines. If there are too many competitors for a particular keyword it may be better to use less competitive keywords for your web pages or use them in conjunction with the most popular ones.

I will also analyze the link popularity of your competitors to determine how many incoming links they have and what the quality of those links are. You should not link to unrelated sites and ideally link to sites that already attract a lot of traffic.

5. Adding fresh content - web sites that continuously update and/or expand their content, usually experience higher rankings than stagnant web sites. New keywords should first be researched before adding new content. This will help boost your traffic and rankings because visitors will have more ways to land on your site based on the keywords they entered in the search engines. One great way to achieve this is to add new articles to your site on a regular basis.

Conclusion - your web site should be an integral part of your business plan. It may be the first view your visitors have of your business. You therefore should update and maintain it regularly so your visitors will want to revisit and keep doing business with you.