890 Reasons to Have an Active SEO Campaign3 min read

Having managed dozens (perhaps hundreds) of search engine optimization campaigns for our clients over the years, we are often asked why having an active, continuous search engine optimization (SEO) effort is preferable to just “doing SEO” once, or perhaps here and there, and then letting it go. After all, it’s entirely possible that a properly set-up site will show-up reasonably high on search engine results pages. Not only is this becoming increasingly rare (especially as your competitors become more savvy and engage in SEO efforts of their own), but imagine the impact that could be made if you actively engaged in the process! Moving up just a few positions can make a huge difference in the amount of traffic you get, as Chitika Advertising found in a 2013 study of tens of millions of online ad impressions:

As if to drive home the point, just last month, a key Google search employee let slip on his Google Plus page (that has since been deleted) that their team has made “more than 890 improvements to Google Search last year alone.” If you’re keeping track, that is almost 2.5 changes a day! This means what works in SEO today may change, and things that have worked previously may not work tomorrow. This is not all that surprising, as we’ve seen many changes within the SEO community and major brands like JC Penny, Ebay, WordPress, BMW, Washington Post, Overstock.com, BBC, Mozilla, Forbes, and even Google itself have been penalized for not keeping up and/or following the SEO rules.

A responsible SEO company will not only keep up with all of these changes, they will work to keep their clients’ sites updated accordingly. To that end, the team here at Sharp Innovations actively reads articles, follows blogs, looks at the forums, engages in ongoing training, and generally works to keep our eyes open for changes in search algorithms. We do this to keep your website ranking as high as it can for the words, phrases and themes that are most important to your business. Monitoring changes to the algorithm and adjusting your website appropriately, watching your backlinks to ensure they are of good quality, and making sure your everyday updates are not interfering with Google’s ability to find and index your website are just a few of the reasons you’d want to engage in an active SEO campaign.

Starting and stopping a campaign, or just “doing SEO” once and letting it go would mean all of these alterations, tweaks, and modifications would go unmonitored while your SEO efforts potentially erode away, and your competitors capitalize on the changes. Even after you’ve realized what happened and restarted the campaign, we’d have to bring your website back up to date, and wait while the search engines crawl and indexing the changes, which can take weeks or months. For example, if your site was penalized under the “Penguin” update last year, Google’s John Mueller recently confirmed you must wait until they update the Penguin algorithm to recover. That doesn’t seem too bad, until you realize it’s been almost a full year since the last Penguin refresh! Can your website go a year without being ranked well in Google?

We don’t want to see any of our SEO clients end up behind their competitors in search performance. If you’d like to learn more about our SEO programs, or would like to speak with someone about what we can offer your business, feel free to contact us for a free consultation.