It is often difficult to understand when you should review your SEO strategy. Getting the timing right is always tricky, even if you know what needs to be done. If you do it too often, you do not allow your setup to show results. If you wait too long, you might lose SEO juice and traffic, which leads to lower conversion rates. Therefore, this article aims to analyze different SEO elements and explain when they should be updated.
Why should you review your SEO strategy and update it?
Overall, SEO is very important for your business because it is a free tool that substantially grows your online presence. Without it, your website and your business are invisible online.
If you don’t regularly update your SEO strategies, your business will suffer consequences that will reflect poorly on your profit and the customers.
What are the expectations?
Before you start making any changes, you need to know what your plans are. The expectations you set will directly affect your marketing strategy in the future, as well as help with how to choose realistic marketing goals.
Furthermore, after every SEO update, you need to know how to check if the update was successful or not. This is why you need clear goals on what you are trying to achieve with your marketing strategy. You need a reference point to tell you whether the update had a positive impact on your business or not.
On-page and off-page SEO
All of your SEO splits into two different categories: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. The timing will vary depending on what SEO elements you want to audit.
On-page SEO refers to elements that are an actual part of your website, like keywords, tags, content, images, etc.
Off-page SEO is everything that happens outside of your website but affects the SEO rating. For example, backlinks, citations, and social media.
Let’s delve deeper into these elements and see when to audit them.
Keywords and keyword metrics
Keywords are the central part of SEO. They categorize your website and make connecting with the targeted customer group easier. As your business changes, so will your online presence and the overall approach you take when communicating with clients. As a result of that change, your keywords will also evolve to a better version.
Keyword metrics are really important because they tell you how your keywords are performing on a monthly level. Also, people make many SEO mistakes, and monitoring the metrics might point to a few. As soon as you notice a drop in the average monthly search, it is time for a change.
The best practice would be to revisit your keywords at least four times a year. If you split your business into quarters, you can use that time to monitor keywords. Additionally, if you plan a particular campaign or promote a product, it is a good idea to audit your keywords at least three to six months in advance to get the market’s feel.
Content optimization
The easiest way to explain content optimization is to look at an article on a blog. Besides the actual content of the article, there are a bunch of different elements in the background:
- keywords;
- title tags;
- meta description;
- image attributes;
Every piece of content needs to be written with these elements in mind. They affect other things on your website and contribute to the overall efficiency of SEO. Furthermore, these elements also properly place your content, so it correctly shows in relevant search results.
When it comes to content optimization, we need to pay attention to a couple of metrics:
- the number of times a keyword appears on one page;
- is the keyword appearing as a part of the title and the image attributes;
- the length of meta description;
- how long are sentences;
- the size of images;
- how many links appear on the page;
All of these elements together create your content. When it comes to auditing content, that usually happens for two reasons. First, Google’s algorithm changed, and it is crucial to revisit your content to make sure there is no new rule that will affect it negatively. And second, you are changing your keyword strategy, and all the content needs to be updated.
Social media profiles
One of the ways to review your SEO strategy is to check your social media periodically. Regarding following social media metrics, you want to monitor the number of followers and how they interact with your business on social media. This includes how often they visit your profile, click on things, share content, mention your business online, like a piece of content, and so on.
The dynamics of social media content are a bit different. You can quickly go viral or make a critical mistake that could shut down your business. That is why you want to closely monitor each post as soon as it is published and revisit your content strategy weekly. If something needs to be changed, that needs to happen now.
Local SEO
Local SEO includes a part of your SEO strategy that targets your clients based on the location. It mainly comprises online directories that keep listings of companies in the area.
When auditing local SEO, you need to ensure that all business information is up to date. This includes business address, contact information, working hours, price range, working days, and so on. As soon as you make a change, you need to update your profiles on online directories.
Maintaining links
Links are also a crucial part of SEO. There are inbound links that take users to a different part of your website and outbound links that take them to a different website.
You should monitor inbound links after every Google algorithm update to ensure there isn’t any new rule that affects them.
When it comes to outbound links, monitor the number of clicks. Revisit them every few months just to make sure they work and that the other website did not shut down or remove the page.
Review your SEO strategy on time!
As you can see, different elements have different requirements. You will have to time everything correctly to review your SEO strategy. That is why we say that SEO is alive and requires constant nurturing.