Why doesn’t one-off website optimization deliver long-term benefits to your business?

SEO comprises two main areas of activity: optimization of the website itself (this is where we address the technical aspects as well as the content) and off-site optimization. While the latter area obviously requires continuous efforts, since it’s all about acquiring external links, it’s easy to fall into a trap when it comes to optimizing the website itself. The assumption that a one-time technical audit and content optimization on subpages will ensure high rankings for years to come is disastrous. This article answers why optimization should be an ongoing process?

That’s something that people who have just deployed changes to the website and are seeing some initial successes might say. Positions jumped into the top 10 or top 5 in the ranking, organic traffic increased by 10-20%, we managed to achieve satisfactory results for local phrases, which are crucial for many businesses such as hotels or restaurants. It is true that by simply implementing some changes, you can significantly improve the positioning of your website. However, to maintain this level, we cannot rest on our laurels. We need to constantly and carefully analyze the website to be where our audience is. If we are absent, our competitors will take over all the traffic, turning it into conversions, and the visibility of our website will decrease day by day. Only a combination of many one-off steps, and changing some of them into cyclical ones, will ensure a permanent and stable position for our business in Google.

The market, regardless of our line of business, is highly saturated and usually very competitive. It’s hard to find an underserved niche – we’ll always be up against competition, be it direct or indirect. When planning and executing measures aimed at building the position and recognition of our brand, we must keep in mind that our competitors are doing exactly the same. Paid campaigns are a good example – if we stop advertising and our competitors don’t, they will quickly take over our positions, our users and the traffic they generate. The same is true for positioning. We should not forget about our competitors’ activities, even when our website ranks first in the search results. We should remember that other websites are constantly fighting for their place in the TOP 3 and if we stop taking action, stop acquiring links or constantly improving the website, our position will sooner or later be snatched by competitive brands, and the positioning of the website and its online visibility will decline. To ensure long-term effectiveness of SEO, it is essential that we constantly monitor our performance and that of our competitors and respond quickly to even the smallest declines.

It is one thing to optimize a website for Google search, monitor our competitors and take steps to get or stay ahead of them. Another thing is continuous Google updates which, over the past year, have sometimes caused confusion in positions and, consequently, in results. In the second half of 2021 alone, Google rolled out several Google Core Algorithm Updates, involving changes to its search algorithms and systems. This often significantly disrupts, temporarily or permanently, the results. Consequently, it is necessary to constantly update the website in line with current guidelines and to include new areas that will be evaluated and scored by Google. Website monitoring and analytics are also necessary to control how changes in algorithms have affected our site and its position.

So how do we take care of a website to make it perform well all the time? The most important thing is to learn to be patient and systematically revisit areas that have already been optimized. Especially if we see even small, unfavorable changes in our website’s positions. Having worked on large projects, we have seen many times that the joy of achieving our objectives does not last long. This is particularly evident for e-commerce websites, where the pace of change is enormous, websites face fierce competition, and the difficulty of achieving high positions keeps growing. That’s why we continue to thoroughly check the technical condition of websites and implement new enhancements every month. Naturally, we also continuously work with the content – we verify the volatility of the potential phrases, add new phrases to the analysis, that grow dynamically along with the trends, and update the key content. Based on our experience, we can confirm that subtle but well-thought-out changes in headlines or metadata can contribute to significant increases.

SEO not only requires a vast amount of knowledge that is constantly updated and supplemented. It also requires accuracy, patience and determination, because only by combining these variables can we stay alert, prepare for change and fight for our clients’ small successes every day.