SEO is one of those key phrases that many content creators and website designers refer to. However, it’s not always fully understood for many. One of the key ideas that’s commonly misunderstood about SEO is that it’s not just something that you can tick off at the inception stage of a website. Instead, it’s a continual process that must be returned to on a regular basis to ensure that good SEO is maintained at all times.
In this article, we’ll answer the question, “How often should SEO be done?”. In doing so, we examine what exactly SEO is and why SEO is so critically important to a website. We also explore if it’s beneficial to carry out SEO even more regularly than a competitor.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In practice it means creating, writing, and constructing a website and its content so that it can be found by search engines. Search engines will look for the keywords or phrases that a person asks by crawling through the web for sites that answer that person’s query.
For example, if a person types “what is SEO?” into Google, Google will search the web for all the websites that answer this question. It will then rank those answers according to the relevance and usefulness that it believes those websites to be in. As a result, the better the SEO, the better the ranking.
Ranking is just one of the reasons why SEO is so important for a website and its success. The higher up the rankings a website is in a search engine query, the more likely it is to be clicked on by a user. This then has a knock-on effect to its rankings as the more clicks it receives and the longer the user spends on a page, the more relevant and useful a search engine believes that website to be. It will therefore be more likely to return that website as an answer to that query and move it up the rankings if it’s further down the results page.
Crucially, SEO is simply a vital way for a website to be found at all. If it’s not found by a search engine, the traffic a site will receive will be lower than it needs to be. In fact, the only traffic it will receive is the traffic from a user who has been sent a link directly. If you think of your website as your digital shop window, you want that shop window to be seen as much as possible. Good SEO practices is one of the ways that you get more people walking by your shop window and hopefully walking into your shop to purchase goods or services from you.
SEO is not something that you can do once at the set up of your website and forgotten about. To stay relevant and useful in terms of Google and other search engines, it needs to be carried out once a month to ensure that the right keywords and phrases are still used on your website and its pages. If you do not do it once a month per page, you will be fully susceptible to your page no longer hitting the right target in terms of keyword content. Your website and its pages will likely slip down the rankings, which then becomes a self-perpetuating cycle that is difficult to escape from. The lower down the rankings you are, the less likely your website will be clicked through to, which then means it gets put further down the rankings.
It can be tempting to do SEO more than once a month to ensure that it’s the very best it can be at all times. However, doing it too often will take away your time and energy from running other key parts of your business. Doing SEO once a month is striking the right balance between ensuring your website is as good as it can be, while giving you time to direct your attention to running your company. It’s also important to keep in mind that you will not see immediate SEO results, which means that constantly changing content and keywords won’t give your website time to see better results. Sometimes with SEO, less can be more.
Carrying out SEO audits regularly is key to ensuring your website is always high up in search engine queries and rankings. Set time aside each month to go through each page of your website to make sure that all content has the very best SEO as well as making sure that all links work and all URLs are correct with excellent SEO as well.
"Just recently, I was able to take a pretty competitive keyword from #12 (page 2), up to #5 on page 1 in 14 or 15 days."
