If you want to achieve a high ranking for your website, ongoing SEO maintenance is critical. It is because rankings don’t stay for long – they’re constantly changing as more businesses come online, expand their web presence, and the algorithms of search engines change to meet users’ needs.
That’s why it’s so important to do regular audits and analyses of your website, its pages, and your ranking strategies. Here’s a checklist for essential year-round tasks to keep your site at the top of the search engine results page.
Off-Page Optimization
Off-page SEO uses techniques outside your site to improve its ranking on a search engine results page (SERP). These strategies include creating valuable backlinks, commenting on blogs, joining forum discussions, guest posting, and more.
Links are one of the essential off-page factors that search engines use to determine a website’s relevance, trustworthiness, and authority. Getting quality backlinks from reputable sites is crucial for demonstrating that your site has the right content and deserves a higher ranking.
Google uses over two hundred factors to determine the rank of a website, and it values every link that passes from a site to yours as a signal. For example, a link from the National Dog Association weighs more than a link from a lifestyle blogger.
This SEO maintenance checklist is designed to help you identify and take care of all the essential year-round tasks that can affect your SEO rankings. It is a partial list, but it should cover most basics and ensure you take all critical steps as your business grows online.
On-Page Optimization
Search engines use crawlers to crawl websites and find relevant pages for particular searches. They also look at how well each site’s content answers these queries.
It is why it’s crucial to regularly update your on-page SEO to ensure that your site’s content matches the correct search terms so that you can turn visits into sales. It includes updating meta titles, descriptions and URLs and optimizing your content for mobile devices.
Another critical component of on-page optimization is ensuring you utilize structured data, like schema markup, on your website. It can help search engines understand your content better and improves your organic rankings by allowing Google to display more information within the search results.
If you need help starting this task, you can get a jumpstart by reading the Search Quality Guidelines to understand how Google evaluates your website. Then, you can begin working on your content using the guidelines in mind. It will allow you to focus on keywords that will be most helpful for your business while also providing valuable, informative content for your visitors.
Link Building
The more high-quality links going to your website, the better. Link building is a crucial part of SEO. It is because search engines like Google consider links to be a signal of authority, and the more authoritative a page is, the higher it will appear in search results.
The key to a successful link-building campaign is to target websites relevant to your niche. That means targeting sites with high domain authority (DA) and those that have content similar to your own.
Another way to build links is to create high-quality content that web admins will likely want to share and link back to. It can be as simple as offering a free trial of your product or sneak peeks.
Getting quality links is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization, but it’s also one of the most time-consuming and challenging. Fortunately, there are plenty of fool-proof strategies that you can use to get the most out of your link-building efforts. These can be particularly helpful for busy marketers eager to get their SEO on track.
Monitoring
The systematic gathering and analysis of data for tracking progress about predetermined plans and ensuring adherence to norms is known as monitoring. It focuses on using data to manage performance actively, includes deliberate and ongoing reflection on successes and failures, and supports learning.
It can be carried out by local teams or globally as part of an overall monitoring system. It can also be linked to other monitoring systems to inform them and to provide a synthesized picture of a project’s progress. It can work across levels, systems and boundaries, such as working with a funding organization’s systems and supporting partner organizations’ strategies.
The first step is to identify the data that you need to monitor. It could be servlogs, machine data, third-party data sources or any other type of information. Next, you need to find a tool that can support it.
Keyword Research
SEO is a process that requires careful planning and execution. It is why it’s essential to set up a regular maintenance checklist and stick to it year after year.
This approach will ensure that your site continues to rank for favourable terms and keep you ahead of the competition. It also allows you to improve your site’s overall performance, which can help you maintain or increase your SERP position.
Keyword research is one of the essential parts of any SEO campaign. It helps you identify keywords relevant to your business and target audience and a decent search volume.
Keyword research can be done in several ways, including keyword tools. Depending on your budget, you can choose a free tool or a premium option that provides more data and advanced features.
