Why your SEO needs to be continually worked on

SEO and Your Old & Tired Website

SEO and first page rankings

One of the questions we get a lot is why search engine optimization needs to be continually worked on once rankings have been achieved.  Most business owners understand that SEO is a process that takes some time, but once desired rankings for a keyword are achieved, does the work end there?  In short, the answer is no.  First page rankings on the major search engines is a very competitive business, and just because you have invested money to get your business to the first page does not mean the work is over, you almost could say the work has just really begun.  Maintaining rankings for competitive keywords is a game.  It’s a game of proving to the search engines that your website and the content/structure of your website is still the best result for them, each and every day.

Just because your business has been around the longest, and you’ve had your website the longest doesn’t mean you’ll be ranked #1

We’ve had many conversations with businesses who’ve been around for a long time but can’t understand how their competitor whose only be around for a few years still outranks them.  There’s literally hundreds of different factors that the search engines grade on when determining rankings, and age of your domain is only one of those factors.  Age of domain is a pretty strong ranking factor, but so are freshness of content, layout of your website, speed of your website, design, and so on.  Looking at your website and comparing the user experience your website delivers versus the user experience your competitors website delivers is usually a good place to start.  Probably one of the best single pieces of advice we give small business owners is really asking them if their website really reflects who they are as a company and how they are the best at what they do.  Usually the answer is no.

SEO is proving you’re the best option

One thing I think that many business owners forget is that search engines like Google run a business as well.  So when someone uses their product, they want to return the very best, interactive, and up to date results possible.  If you think about it in the terms of a consumer using a search engine, they do a search, don’t find what they want, they refine their search, still don’t find what they want, has that search engine delivered a quality user experience?  What if the search engine returned website results based upon who had been in business the longest, but didn’t take into account that some of those websites wouldn’t work on the iPad the searcher was using.  Would that be a good user experience?  Probably not, and chances are good that the unsatisfied consumer would go to another web resource to find what they are looking for, if that happens too many times, that search engine has lost a customer.