SEO Services - Why You Need a Search Engine Optimization Maintenance Service Plan

December 11th, 2007

These days it is not enough to simply have a new website designed, have the website optimized by SEO Professionals, and expect it to continually rank well. To ensure that your website will continuously improve its rankings, you need a search engine optimization maintenance plan. There is a very simple reason for this: rankings attract more visitors and make more sales. If you leave your site alone after the initial optimization, you are likely to quickly lose the new business your website generated from the initial optimization.

The bulk of the work was done when you first optimized your website. Now you want to maintain that success and even improve upon it. The good news is that SEO maintenance tends to cost much less than the initial optimization. The cost, of course, depends upon your website and the industry it caters to. Typically the more competitive the industry, the more expensive it is to maintain your ranking.

Here is a list of features which are included in Digital Peabody’s SEO maintenance plans:

Ranking Analysis – Search engine rankings fluctuate. Not only are your competitors trying to out rank you but the search engines also change their ranking formulas. More sites are added to the web each day so you need a professional website company to monitor your search engine rankings for each of the major search engines.

Traffic Tracking – To stay on top, you need to know where your web visitors are coming from and what keywords are being used to find your site. If the majority of your traffic is landing on one particular page, you need to know so that you can put your most important message or best products on that page. Understanding your traffic is all about keeping your ranking and using that information to increase sales and improve services.

Keyword Research – The thousands of websites that are added to the internet each day influence the ranking of keywords. Keywords that received high rankings a few months ago may not do so today. In other words, high search engine positions for your most important keyword phrases is great but if you are not receiving any traffic from those phrases, you will need to evaluate the keywords that you have used. Attaining a #1 ranking for keywords that no one will search for, is not very helpful.

Researching New Keywords – For the reasons stated above, you must maintain good rankings. Analysis of the current keywords used on your site plus researching new ones is important to your business. But you don’t merely identify a list of keywords. You need to add updated the content of your website to include the new keywords. Often times this includes minor changes to the page titles, meta tags, and text headings. Sometimes it may involve additional sections to the site, rewriting content and reorganizing the website’s structure. The degree of changes needed to accommodate new keywords is dependent upon the specific requirements of your website and market.

Competitive Analysis - An integral part of search engine optimization is determining what keywords your competitors are using. Since competition is always changing, you need to continually know where your key competitors are currently ranked for the same keywords you are using for your website. It is also a good idea to know how many competitors you have within each of the major search engines.

Inbound Links – The more inbound links or links that point back to your site there are to your site, the better your ranking will be on the search engines. You need to routinely increase the amount and quality of the inbound links to your site. This requires extensive research of other sites related to yours and requesting to add or exchange links with them.

SEO maintenance should be an integral part of your business plan. Since a website is often the first introduction people have to your business you must make sure that they will find you. After the initial optimization is done, you, therefore, need to continuously maintain and improve upon those results.

To find out more about Digital Peabody’s Search Engine Optimization Maintenance Plans, please call Lauren Engel at 303-468-5707 or 312-933-3430.