If you’ve had SEO active for anything longer than a year, you know by now that there’s a lot more to it than keywords and links.
You know by now that SEO is more complex than other channels.
You know by now, that SEO requires a lot of work.
Why is this…?
Why does SEO require so much work to be successful?
And once you are successful with the channel, why does it still take a lot to maintain the success of the channel?
Let’s explore this…
I want to offer you a reason as to why SEO needs so much maintenance.
This reason simply being that SEO is the lifeblood of a website
I say this often, and I mean it. It’s true! If you have a website, you need SEO.
I am, of course, assuming your site is a commercial one, that you want to attain traffic with it, that it contributes to your business revenue – directly, or even, indirectly.
You see, your site is discovered by people through search engines.
Without you doing any SEO work to it, it receives SEO traffic.
This is the power of search!
Organic tends to be in the top 3 traffic generating channels without any work having been done with SEO.
When you activate the channel, i.e. when you invest in it, you then begin to wield it better.
You strategically use it to attain targeted traffic via the channel.
When you carry out SEO for the first time, you’ll come to realise that, even though you’ve been getting SEO traffic, it’s nowhere near the level of traffic you could be receiving.
And the only reason why you’re currently not receiving the traffic is because the site is simply not optimised.
So the logic is clear – optimise the site, get more traffic.
True.
But there’s more to it than that.
Not optimising the site doesn’t mean you’ll maintain the level of traffic you’re currently receiving.
In reality, not taking action to optimise means you’re likely to lose the level of traffic you’re currently receiving.
This is search.
SEO has become so much a core of a website that you cannot afford to not have the channel activated.
The cost becomes too great.
There was a time when SEO wasn’t so integral to the success of a website.
These days, however, the bar of SEO has risen.
Good SEO is at a higher level than it was a decade ago.
A decade ago, an area of your site, which wasn’t very search engine-friendly wasn’t detrimental to the entire site.
These days – it is!
SEOs increasingly need to consider the health of the entire domain.
So you see, a business having an SEO agency on retainer to ‘own’ a business unit on a site, is not doing the channel any favours if there isn’t someone looking after the overall site health from an SEO POV.
This is essentially fixing the site without considering all of the threats it has.
It’s no longer enough to have a strategy that aims to increase organic traffic.
You need a strategy that considers the risk analysis of the site, on a daily basis.
And this isn’t an exaggeration.
On any day, your site could be compromised, which will affect its crawling, which will affect its rankings, which will impact your traffic.
Say, for example, the homepage of your site was updated by the web team.
And unfortunately, they accidentally published the update with a noindex tag on the page.
A mistake like this, as innocent as may be, could have major implications for your site’s visibility in the search engines.
It will affect the traffic the page receives, and, because it’s the homepage, may affect other pages on the site.
Unfortunately, an issue like this may not be noticed for a while.
Because it affects search directly, it’s an issue that wouldn’t be discovered until after the fact – after the page is already negatively impacted in the SERPs.
From an SEO point of view, this would be something that is spotted much sooner than at the point where your site loses the traffic the page would have received.
And by the way, a mistake like this is more common than you may think.
You see, because SEO is so wide and vast, and is affected by any and everyone who manages your website, there is an unlimited number of things that could impact your SEO traffic.
As such, SEOs spend a huge portion of their time preventing the site from being destroyed.
I mean this from a search point of view, of course!
At any point, any department can cause your site to lose its rankings.
SEOs always have to monitor, on a daily basis, and flag, to take action, on any activity that will affect your search performance.
Not having this in place is like sailing ahead without actually looking ahead.
You’ll go forth but at any point you could hit an iceberg.
And if you’ve had SEO active for anywhere more than a year, you know that SEO takes a lot of work.
This is a lot of work just to optimise.
A lot of work just to improve your search visibility.
A lot of work just to increase traffic.
All of this work can be setback, or in an extreme case, destroyed, by a minor mishap, which ends up impacting your website revenue.
The maintenance of SEO includes mitigating the threats to your website, that are often internally generated.
