Engaging in search engine optimization (SEO) brings your store to the top of the search engines—a process that results in steady streams of warm and often buyer-ready customers.
However, SEO isn’t something you do once and forget.
Sure, you may optimize your store for SEO initially when you launch it.
But you’ll quickly fall behind if you aren’t always working to keep your store optimized for search engines and the people using them.
Thus, SEO is a continuous process. Here are five reasons why you must constantly refine your SEO.
1. The algorithms are constantly changing
First and foremost, search engines are continually updating and refining their complex search algorithms.
They do this because hundreds of millions of websites are all battling for the top spots in the results. Because of this, many of these websites engage in “black hat” SEO practices (like keyword stuffing) to outrank competitors without actually providing value. Thus, the search engines must refine their algorithms regularly to render these “unethical” SEO tactics useless.
On top of that, search engines always look for ways to deliver more relevant results to users and adapt to future trends: One day, numerous products on your store might be hitting the #1–3 spots for multiple keywords, bringing you tons of easy revenue. Then, overnight, your traffic dries up completely thanks to Google tweaking its algorithm. All that revenue is lost in an instant.
With this in mind, you must always work on your SEO. That includes keeping up with and adapting to algorithm changes.
2. User behavior changes
Customers constantly change and evolve in how they search for things, too. You may be targeting particular keywords or phrases now for your products, but tomorrow, your users might change the keyword phrases they use in those searches.
If you aren’t frequently doing keyword research, you won’t notice when your current keyword strategy becomes obsolete. Furthermore, you won’t be able to stay ahead of competitors by discovering and targeting new, low-competition long-tail keywords used by buyer-ready customers.
As you can see, keyword research is one of the most vital SEO steps you need to follow regularly.
3. Frequent SEO efforts keep your rankings high
It’s simple: Frequently updating your SEO keeps your rankings high. SEO campaigns often take a long time to show results, and changes in several variables (such as user behavior) can affect your campaign’s effectiveness.
Thus, you can’t set and forget SEO campaigns. You must always refine your strategy and make changes as needed.
This is especially true if you use content marketing to rank higher in the search engines. To keep your customers engaged with your content, you have to make more of it regularly—and you’ve got to ensure it’s optimized for keywords and helpful to the reader.
4. Your business changes
Your business isn’t static. You may release or discontinue a product line, expand into new markets, and so on.
Most of these changes necessitate adjustments to your SEO strategy. For example, if you release a new product, you’ll need to research the audience and the best keywords to target.
It’s a similar story if you expand into a new market. You’ll have to learn about a whole new audience and their search habits and see what kind of keywords they use to look for the products you sell.
If you discontinue a product, you may have to remove internal links and mentions of it to stop sending traffic to a nonexistent product page.
These are just a few examples. Any time your business changes, consider the SEO effects.
5. Your competition is after your search spots
You’re not the only one trying to reach #1—your competitors are, too. If you ever let up on SEO efforts, your competitors will be more than happy to step in and snag your search rankings. That includes both your current competition and new entrants that want to take you down.
Whether or not you believe your most direct competition is paying attention to SEO, you should hammer down on your SEO process anyway. At best, you’ll be far ahead of competitors who aren’t trying to rank high in the search engines. At worst, you’ll still remain on top of a competitive market.
Strong SEO requires continuous attention
The SEO process is never-ending—if you hope to stay competitive, that is.
But just because you have to update your SEO continuously doesn’t mean it should be a tough task. The less time you spend on SEO (without compromising on your campaigns’ quality), the more time you have to grow your business through other means.
Verbolia makes it easy to grab those coveted top spots and gain more traffic. All you have to do is import the keywords you need to rank for into Verbolia, and the platform will build SEO-optimized pages on autopilot. Verbolia will even adjust your internal linking to keep crawlers happy.
Then, you can analyze various metrics for each page and watch your traffic grow. From there, you can make any tweaks with ease.
