The Gist
SEO is an ongoing process, not a one-off project. To be effective, SEO must be treated as an ongoing, long-term process rather than a series of short-term, independent projects. It requires regular attention and management due to constantly changing factors such as Google’s algorithm, your website content, and your competition.Quality content is crucial for SEO: Providing well-written and purposeful content is at the heart of any successful SEO strategy.Choosing the right SEO partner can improve your results: Working closely with an SEO agency or expert over an extended period can lead to better results. As the SEO team becomes more familiar with your content and keywords, they can optimize your site more effectively.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a fundamental aspect of website management that is critical to building brand awareness and generating leads. If people can’t find your website content, much of the effort put into creating a great site and impactful content is effectively wasted.
Despite the importance of SEO, many web and digital marketing teams are still surprisingly unaware of it SEO basics. For many, it remains a kind of dark art and a mysterious practice that requires deep expertise with ever-changing requirements.
Due to a lack of in-house skills, as well as resource and budget constraints, many teams choose to rely on external expertise for SEO. This is often a sensible approach, especially since there are some SEO practices that can be quite specialized, but it can lead to some problems:
SEO efforts and improvement tend to occur in short, independent bursts based on the involvement of specialists on an ad hoc basis, rather than providing a continuous, ongoing SEO process. There are plenty of self-proclaimed SEO experts out there, but it can be difficult for digital geeks. marketing teams to check whether the advice and actions they receive are successful or not. There is no skill transfer to the digital marketing team in terms of knowledge and understanding of SEO practices.
The combination of these trends can lead to SEO that is less effective than it should be and doesn’t deliver the kind of continuous, long-term SEO improvement that digital teams are looking for and deliver tangible results.
Why is sustainable SEO critical?
For the best results, it’s important to take a more sustainable and less short-term approach to SEO. Let’s look at some of the reasons for this.
Effective SEO is a moving target
SEO doesn’t stand still. Improvements made that might be effective today may not necessarily still be effective in the future. Changes can occur in a number of different criteria that will affect SEO, such as the way Google builds its algorithm, changes to your own website or the content that feeds it, or even changes to the your CMS. New keywords also appear and other websites may start to outrank you. For all these reasons and more, SEO is indeed a moving target that needs ongoing attention and management.
Related Article: State of SEO: Google Search Algorithm Updates for Q2 2023
SEO is a process, not a project
It is difficult to achieve successful SEO if you have a short-term view. Hiring an SEO consultant every once in a while won’t do. It’s much more about providing an ongoing process that keeps adding new SEO-optimized content that builds on success.
The core of successful SEO is implementing everyday processes and practices that are part of how you manage a website and its content, rather than running a series of separate projects.
Content is king
Providing well-written content that serves a purpose remains at the heart of any successful SEO strategy. Content can’t just be about SEO, it needs to entice your audience to want to visit and then return to your site.
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Any SEO approach should also have an accompanying content strategy that defines your medium and long-term goals for the content and ensures that it has value.
Related article: Google’s useful content update improves customer experience and SEO strategy
Keep an eye on your data, with the right tools and research
Successful SEO by its very nature is data-driven and therefore depends on ensuring that the right tools are in place for reporting and keyword research. In particular, it’s important that your analytics package (eg Google Analytics) is configured to align with your SEO goals and processes.
The landscape of SEO and analytics tools is broad; having the right tools is an important component to establishing a more sustainable approach to SEO and making the most of your data.
Pick the right partner and stick with them
We believe SEO works best in a partnership. One thing we’ve found is that when an SEO agency or expert works closely with a client over a sustained period of time, the SEO team has a better understanding of the types of content and specialized keywords that will resonate with a segmented audience .
At the same time, the marketing team will gain a better understanding of SEO practices, especially if they are beginners and less experienced, but also potentially even if they have advanced knowledge. This can influence how the content is written and reviewed, so it is already partially optimized for SEO before being worked on by an SEO agency.
Ultimately, when the SEO team knows a target audience and the marketing team knows more about SEO, they can better align content management practices with the SEO process, which ultimately leads to better performance of SEO.
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