Optimizing Your Website: Why Your Business Needs a Monthly SEO Program
As a business owner or employee, you’ve probably heard the term Search Engine Optimization (SEO) before. At a high level, this is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search results.
Search engines, such as Google, have a crawler that goes out and gathers information about all the content they can find online, which they bring back to the search engine to build an index. That index runs through an algorithm that tries to match all that data with an individual’s search query.
These search engines, especially Google, are ever-changing and adjusting the signals and variables in their algorithms. As website owners and marketers, sometimes we know what is coming and can plan, but in most cases, we cannot. For this reason, including many others, it is critical for your business to have an SEO program. Not only is it vital to implement said SEO program, but it is also necessary to conduct monthly maintenance.
SEO is not something you can set and forget. 71% of search traffic clicks occur on the first page of Google only! If you are not paying attention, you could lose out on business to your competitors. Your business should have a set SEO strategy that lasts as long as your website does to make it as successful as it can be.
Not sure where to start? We can help with that. Here are some reasons why BBstone implements monthly SEO programs for our clients and why you should too!
Reviewing your rankings & optimizing
By monitoring your existing keyword rankings, you can stay on top of any alarming upward or downward movements. If you discover that you are slipping in your search engine rankings, you can make a plan to focus on incorporating more content and keywords into your website.
It is also smart to write down the featured snippets for content that is already ranking. By doing so, you can use this information to optimize your site. If you are not familiar with this term, featured snippets are short lines of text that populate at the top of Google’s search results to answer a user’s query. The content inside of a featured snippet gets pulled from websites in Google’s index.
Finding new content opportunities
By regularly reviewing your most popular topics and subtopics, you can find new content opportunities that address common questions or interests your target audience has.
Connect with your sales, customer service, and social media teams to see what kind of comments, questions, or concerns people have regarding your business. Additionally, you can check out what your competitors are writing and posting about for inspiration.
Reviewing traffic trends
Looking at your month-over-month organic traffic trends will help you identify pages on your website that are slipping in traffic and should be optimized. If you notice a drop in rankings for your main keywords or a steady decline in weekly traffic, you can flag those pages for a more thorough review.
Checking in on competitors
Reviewing your competitors’ performance allows you to see what kind of content they have produced, if they have received any new backlinks, and if they are moving in on any of your keywords. You can also check in on their Moz domain authority score to see how your company compares and where you could improve.
Planning and prioritizing
Once you have gathered your monthly data, you can prioritize your tasks for the next four weeks. There is no set formula for SEO maintenance, what your company will need to focus on to improve your site may be completely different from what another business needs to do. Some of the most important tasks include optimizing your published content, creating new content, and monitoring your traffic trends.
At the end of every month, you can review your progress and continue to see what is working and what you need to focus on moving forward!
Ready to reach your SEO goals? Call, DM, or email us at sbellem@bbrookstone.com to get started. We would love to help your website reach its full potential.
