So, you’ve successfully optimised your website and ranked on the first page of search engines – great! Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has paid off and your online business is well on its way to success.
At this point, you might be thinking “well, time to say goodbye to all those HTML coding, keyword research, and understanding analytics!”
Unfortunately, that’s not true. Not by a long shot.
As long as you have an online presence to maintain and an online business to manage, you will need to optimise your website for search engines on a regular basis. Below, we list some reasons why neglecting your SEO can damage your online business.
Search engine rules change over time
To keep their search engine result pages relevant, clean, and authoritative, search engines frequently update their rules and guidelines. Big search engines like Google update their rules and guidelines regularly, so neglecting to optimise your website according to the latest guidelines can damage your website ranking and lower your traffic significantly.
One prime example of this is the recent change in the character length of Meta description allowed on Google’s search result pages. Google increased the character count of the Meta description tag on their results page, giving websites more room to provide readers a better idea of what their website is about and how relevant it is to their search. Changes like these can come at any moment, so keeping your SEO sharp is important.
Keywords are volatile
Like all trends, keyword trends can go out of style really fast, especially with new terms being popularized and older ones getting dropped. If you fail to keep your keywords relevant and up-to-date, you can expect big drops in your traffic over time.
It’s important to keep keywords on your website relevant and up-to-date to avoid losing out on the search engine competition; revisiting your keywords every 3-6 months to make sure your keywords are still relevant will help keep your website under Google’s radar, while keeping track of your keywords’ average monthly searches will help you when you decide to optimise your keywords later on.
It’s also important to keep updated with keywords relevant to your industry, just in case you want to launch a digital marketing campaign or promotion. Knowing what keywords to use will keep your online business on top of search engines and ensure the flow of online traffic is not diminished.
Links die over time
Believe it or not, but links could die over time. Links that direct to pages or websites that are no longer available are called “dead links” and often re-directs to a “404 error” page. By neglecting to root out any dead links in your website, it could affect the credibility of your website when search engines crawl it – and yes, this means a lower ranking.
Dead links mostly happen when websites undergo restructuring. When websites undergo restructuring, they often reorganize their directory and change their URLs. This result in pages that redirect to the old URL (the old website) to break or “die.”
Search engines don’t like websites with lots of dead links since crawlers can’t authenticate your website properly. This means search engines won’t bother adding you on top of the page since you won’t provide your readers a good experience. Too many dead links could leave your website dead as well, so weed out dead links out regularly.
SEO is an important task for any website that wants to remain competitive in search engines. But optimising for search engines is not a one-time thing and should always be done regularly to keep your website and online presence at its peak. If you truly value your online business, getting a team of professionals to help you with your regular SEO tasks would be a good idea.
