It’s a well known fact that good SEO practices will result in good rankings on the results of search engines, resulting in way more organic traffic from people who are legitimately looking to use your service. The higher you rank for your chosen keywords, the more likely someone searching for them will stumble upon your website.
Many people only think about their SEO rankings from the “acquiring” mindset and not so much the “maintaining” mindset. It’s entirely possible for your rankings to shift over time based on a myriad of factors, so therefore it’s entirely necessary to do your due diligence constantly. Algorithms can change, your site can lose its authority through a variety of ways, or your competitors have seriously upped their SEO game. So, it’s important to always know where you stand and some practices to keep your site coming out on top.
“So, it’s important to always know where you stand and some practices to keep your site coming out on top.” says Josh Day at WayFx.
Here’s just a few ways to keep your rankings as high as possible:
Keep Proper Analytics
You won’t be able to do much to maintain your rankings if you aren’t tracking them, now can you? Find a website that will provide you with how your individual pages rank for a particular keyword. This way, you’ll have a comprehensive look as to what kind of terms you have claimed for yourself and be able to track their progress over time. Dozens of websites offer this service with varying levels of quality, but just ensure that whatever service you pick is consistently updated with new rankings and gives you all of the insights you need like the ability to track certain keywords as well as any movements in your own rankings. Those analytics will tell you exactly which pages to put most of your effort into instead of you just shooting blindly in the dark.
Make Sure Your Backlink Profile Stays Intact
Backlinks are a major portion of SEO because major search engines like Google assign any website a level of “authority” in their world of influence. A backlink is simply a dofollow link from another website to your own. If high-quality and trusted sources frequently link to your website, that means that your site must be worth a look too. Adam White from SEO Jet says on this page (https://seojet.net/blog/backlink-checkers/) that your backlink building strategy is a key component in improving your Google rankings, so naturally it is important that you keep track of your backlinks and if they are functioning properly. It’s not out of the question for some of your backlinks to disappear entirely or be switched to a nofollow backlink due to webmaster error. Not keeping track of your backlinks means that you might think you have 20 backlinks when in reality you have 15 or lower due to the passage of time. So, always be vigilant!
Speed Up Your Site
Search engines like Google have a lot of data available to them to make informed decisions as to how certain websites are meeting their user’s needs. In our high-tech world where our attention spans can be quite limited most people aren’t going to wait around for your site to load should your site prove excessively slow. The fact of the matter is that people are much more likely to just go back to their search results and click the next link underneath yours. Google registers this as a “bounce” and if hundreds or thousands of visitors they send your way immediately go back to the search results Google will figure out pretty quickly that your site isn’t one people actually like visiting. After that, it’s a ranking free fall that is exceedingly difficult to recover from.
Update Your Site Frequently
Search engines constantly crawl and re-crawl web pages to make sure their data is completely up to date. If you manage to get a lot of really high rankings, it’s important to go back on those pages and expand on any ideas you’ve put forward and in general just touch up the page to be more appealing. Search engines love the content’s freshness, and updating your pages sends a signal that there’s a much higher chance of more up to date and relevant information on a recently updated page compared to one that’s a few years old. Other things like adding new videos or images to your pages will add more value to your content and keep your rankings nice and high. While search engines do calculate their rankings via robots, these are robots that are coded for the best of the coder’s ability to accurately display what people searching actually want to find.
Use More Relevant, Internal Links
Part of the process any crawler goes through is figuring out what exactly any particular page is about. If one of your pages is part of a series you’ve created on a particular topic, making sure to link to those other relevant pages will keep your rankings nice and healthy for the foreseeable future. The web crawler will see those links and then go check on those pages, if everything seems to be tied together nicely, then it’s a good indicator that you are actually a site worth visiting.
SEO isn’t just something that you can “do” once or twice and have the benefits stay around forever, SEO is an ongoing and constant practice of having the most useful and appealing site you possibly can for both the bots that crawl your site and the people who use it. Some veteran SEOs consider getting ranked a fairly easy process, but maintaining that market dominance of highly competitive keywords is a whole other ball game. After all, would you call them “highly competitive” if that wasn’t the case? If you aren’t constantly checking and upgrading your pages and backlinks to come out on top of the rankings game, eventually some new site can come along and take your rankings out from right underneath your nose. The internet is a cutthroat place where everybody is fighting tooth and nail for a slice of the pie, don’t let anyone take yours after spending all of that time to rank in the first place. Best of luck!