You and your SEO have worked hard to get your website ranked high in your Google search engine results pages (SERPs). If your goal is to generate a regular stream of targeted traffic and leads, this is only the first step in SEO. An even more important step is to ensure that your rankings are well maintained over time. This is where SEO maintenance comes into the picture.

Once you get your website to the first page, there are many more things that can be done to improve its rankings while still maintaining its position. It is important to manage and maintain a website to achieve your desired goals. At Mystic Web Designn, we have some valuable tips for you to maintain your website’s SEO.

Importance of SEO Maintenance

Ongoing SEO maintenance is important for many reasons. The most important ones are as follows:

• Search Rankings are Not Permanent: It is a big achievement to get to the first page or number one ranking in your Google SERPs. However, your competition can replace your website from that top spot. SEO maintenance is required to maintain the rankings.
• Search Engine Algorithms are Always Evolving: Google and other search engines have algorithms that access and process information on websites and webpages before ranking them. These algorithms are being always updated to improve the quality of search results. Your website may be relevant today and gets to rank high, but a change in algorithm may reduce its relevance causing its ranking to fall. SEO maintenance can help ensure your website meets the latest rules of search engine algorithms.

SEO is a long-term marketing strategy, unlike PPC advertising. Continuous maintenance is required here to drive the optimal ROI. It is not a once-and-done strategy.

Tips for SEO Maintenance

So how do you maintain your SEO? Here are the things you should do to maintain your search rankings or even keep improving them over time.

Accessible Resources

Your website resources refer to the CSS files, images, and other content. It is important to make these resources accessible to Google crawlers. When a page is inaccessible, it will not appear in the Index Coverage report. The URL Inspection tool can help determine whether a page is visible to search engine crawlers or not.

Use Sitemaps & Robots.txt

Use sitemaps to encourage search engine crawling and robots.txt rules to prevent it. It is recommended to block crawling in the following scenarios:

• Duplicate content on your website
• Unimportant resources that may overload the server

Sitemaps provide you with a simpler yet effective way to tell search engines the pages that are important to your website.

• Sitemaps help provide additional info to Google
• They enable the crawling of non-textual content
• Google prioritizes crawling pages in the sitemap

Sitemaps also make it easier to get pages crawled that cannot be discovered via links.

Update Your Website

Content freshness is also an important factor in search engine ranking algorithms. As part of your SEO maintenance efforts, it is important to keep your website current.

• You can improve the textual quality or information depth of your content
• Update your content with the addition of useful images and videos to your textual content
• Enrich your content to improve user experience (UX) and encourage more people to share or link to your pages
• Enhance the visual appeal of your brand across your digital assets
• Optimize the layout of your website to improve engagement rates and reduce bounce rates

Reassess UX

User experience (UX) is an important search ranking factor. As part of your SEO maintenance efforts, it is recommended to re-evaluate your website’s UX and keep improving it. Avoid scenarios where users are unable to access your website or unable to find the desired information.

• Correct complex web design
• Fix any instances of broken links
• Create a straightforward web design

Keep in mind that there is always room for improvement in web design.

Keep Building Your Social Media Presence

Google and other search engines see major social media platforms as high-authority URLs. Even when Google has not officially acknowledged the importance of social media signals, it has been found in many tests that they matter. Websites including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn all have commanding PageRank in Google.

Getting more quality backlinks from these social media websites may be helpful in improving your search rankings in the long term. It is recommended to follow these tips to boost your social media engagement:

• Add social media sharing buttons alongside your articles and other content
• Make sure to include clear calls to action (CTA) in your content
• Offer a valuable piece of content for free to users when they share your brand, website, or content on social media

Remove Duplicate Content

Google and other search engines have one goal towering over all others – providing the best search experience to their users. When Google crawlers come across several versions of the same content, it becomes challenging for them to determine which one to index and rank. This may result in excluding all the versions. We suggest that you understand what canonical pages stand for and their impact on crawling and indexing. 

It is recommended to take these steps to remove duplicate content:

• Use canonical tags
• Use 301 redirects for automatically generated duplicate pages
• Bring consistency in your internal linking practice
• Use the hreflang tags when targeting different countries with the same language and content on different websites

If there is copied content on other websites that you cannot control, you will be required to reach out to the website owners and ask them to remove the content. You can also ask them to add a canonical tag that links to your original content. If this doesn’t work, you can report it to Google and get the search engine team’s help in getting the copied content removed.

Besides taking these steps for SEO maintenance, it is recommended to assist google in understanding your website. This will require placing key information in text and not in graphic form, on your website. While images and videos have an important role to play in SEO and Google can assess and index different types of files, the key information on your webpages should be presented in textual format.

So, SEO maintenance is an important part of the process in your overall SEO strategy. When you need SEO services, you can rely on the expertise and experience of the experts at Mystic Web Designn. Feel free to get in touch with us at 1-212-763-6585 or 1-760-216-4589 or send us a message.