You’ve heard of evergreen trees and evergreen content.
But is anything in SEO really evergreen?
With search engines evolving and trends constantly shifting, a one-time SEO effort won’t cut it.
That’s why a solid, ongoing process is essential to long-term SEO success.
It includes tweaking content from the past and adapting nimbly to new challenges and opportunities.
We’ll dive into nine key components of an effective ongoing SEO strategy, from site audits to managing backlinks.
We’ll also answer common FAQs about ongoing SEO service providers, costs, tools, and more, helping you understand the full picture of what’s involved in keeping your SEO efforts strong and impactful.
Further Reading:
- If you’re looking for an SEO management service, check out these 25 questions to ask before hiring an SEO specialist.
- Compare and contrast B2C and B2B marketing and SEO strategies in our detailed guides.
- Whether you need an SEO jumpstart or a high-powered strategy, our comprehensive dives into startup SEO and enterprise SEO have insights for you.
This Article Contains
What is Ongoing SEO and Why Is it Necessary?
9 Key Components of an Effective Ongoing SEO Strategy
- 1. Audits and Data Analysis
- 2. Refreshing and Optimizing Older Content
- 3. Optimizing for Snippets, AI Overviews, and Voice Searches
- 4. Removing or Consolidating Content
- 5. Managing Technical SEO
- 6. Staying Ahead with Market and Keyword Research
- 7. Upholding a Consistent Publishing Schedule
- 8. Managing Your Backlink Profile
- 9. Maintaining Local SEO
6 Ongoing SEO Frequently Asked Questions
Let’s get going!
What is Ongoing SEO and Why Is it Necessary?
Ongoing SEO is the continuous process of optimizing your website to maintain and improve its search engine rankings.
Unlike one-time optimizations, ongoing SEO is a long-term strategy that adapts to constant changes in the digital landscape. Without it, you risk falling behind as your competitors and search engines keep moving forward.
Here’s why ongoing SEO maintenance matters:
- Competitors are always adjusting their content marketing strategies, and without continuous SEO, you risk losing your rankings.
- It helps you find new opportunities and stay ahead of changing industry and SEO trends.
- Google’s frequent algorithm updates require regular adjustments to avoid penalties.
- Periodically updating content ensures it stays relevant and accurate.
- Regular site health audits prevent technical errors that could hurt your site’s performance.
By investing in SEO maintenance, you can continue to generate a strong return on investment (ROI) through sustained organic traffic. It keeps your business competitive in the search results, enables you to react quickly to changes or issues, and allows you to leverage data for sustained improvement.
Really, you should think of continuous SEO like any other indispensable aspect of your business — such as accounting, digital marketing, or customer support. When you stop, the benefits stop, and the dangers start creeping in.
But what does an ongoing SEO strategy actually look like?
Let’s explore.
9 Key Components of an Effective Ongoing SEO Strategy
A successful ongoing SEO strategy involves more than just the occasional update. It requires a well-rounded, proactive approach to keep your website performing at its best.
These nine key components will help ensure your site remains optimized and adaptable, ready to handle new challenges while continuing to drive results.
1. Audits and Data Analysis
One of the foundational rules of SEO is to let data guide you, which requires keeping a finger on the pulse of your website analytics.
You should do an in-depth SEO audit of your content performance and technical SEO at least once per quarter.
Don’t worry, we’ll cover the nitty-gritties of technical SEO maintenance later in this post. For now, when it comes to auditing your SEO strategy and content, here are some steps you can take:
- Content performance analysis: Use tools like Google Analytics and Ahrefs to review which pages are driving traffic, conversions, or engagement. Identify underperforming content that may need updates or optimization.
- Keyword performance: Evaluate your current keyword rankings with tools like SEMrush or Google Search Console to see if they’re still relevant and driving traffic. Adjust your SEO strategy based on this data.
- Competitor analysis: Use tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to examine competitors’ content strategies and determine what’s ranking well and what is missing. Then, plan content that competes and addresses the gaps.
- New content opportunities: Identify emerging topics or trends in your industry. Tools like BuzzSumo can help you uncover new opportunities to target based on what’s hot in your niche.
The overall idea is to do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.
Now, quarterly check-ins alone aren’t enough to ride the waves of SEO. If you only check the data a few times a year, you’ll end up treading water.
On a more or less weekly basis, you must also continuously monitor trends in your data in Google Analytics (GA4) and Google Search Console (GSC). Look out for:
- Content that’s working well, driving traffic and engagement
- Content that’s not bringing the desired results
- Unusual shift in the data, either positive or negative
This will prepare you to respond quickly to shifts in traffic, user behavior, and search engine algorithms.
Bonus read: Check out some top tips to boost the Instagram Conversion Rate for your business.
2. Refreshing and Optimizing Older Content
Search engines often prioritize relevant, fresh content in their rankings. Plus, visitors are more likely to engage and convert when content is relevant and accurate.
So, revisiting and refining existing pages is vital to long-term SEO success.
Wait, all my old pages?
Nope! Focus on high-performing content, especially if the search engine ranking has fallen over time. Additionally, address pages that never ranked well but have promising keyword metrics (low difficulty and high search volume).
Another type of page to update regularly is time-specific content. For example, content that pertains to a specific year or season.
Do this approximately every quarter.
Consider these four factors for content updates:
- Editing for EEAT and accuracy: Update content to show Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EEAT — an essential Google ranking factor). Make sure all information is up-to-date, factual, and well-cited to maintain credibility.
- Addressing changing search intents: Search intents (what searchers are really looking for) can evolve. For example, a keyword like “headless CMS” addresses a relatively new concept. The search engine results page (SERP) may once have called for informational posts, where searchers are now more educated and looking to compare tools.
You may need to rework content to refocus on new information, needs, and pain points.
- Adding new keywords: As SEO trends and search volumes shift, you may find new keywords relevant to your content. Use tools like Ahrefs to discover related terms or queries you can naturally incorporate into your updated content.
- Adding internal links: Include links to relevant new content. This helps expand your content’s usefulness for visitors and teaches search engines more about your website’s topic clusters.
3. Optimizing for Snippets, AI Overviews, and Voice Searches
Google offers several ways to feature content at the very top of search results to give searchers quick answers:
- Featured snippets: Short, clear answers Google pulls directly into search results.
- AI-generated overviews: Google’s AI summarizes content and provides source links.
- Voice searches: Concise chunks of information that virtual assistants like Google Assistant can easily read aloud. Voice search queries tend to be longer and conversational, like questions.
Any time your content is chosen for these SERP features is a win because it places you on top even if you aren’t ranking in the top three.
To improve your chances of being featured, include concise, simple answers to search intents (SI) early in your content. This makes it easier for Google to pick out a relevant section.
Bonus read: Noticing reduced conversions and sales? Find out the common causes behind a Sudden Drop in Website Traffic.
4. Removing or Consolidating Content
Sometimes, despite your best efforts, certain content just doesn’t perform well. It’s important to recognize when to let go of underperforming content.
If a page doesn’t align with your current goals or audience interests, it may be better to remove it entirely. This is also true for content that doesn’t rank or drive traffic, where the keyword metrics don’t justify the time it would take to rework. Purging content like this prevents clutter and ensures that only valuable content remains accessible.
Furthermore, if you have multiple pages targeting similar topics, you could be at risk of keyword cannibalization. This is when your pages compete against each other in search engine results, diluting each page’s traffic and authority and confusing search engines about which page to rank.
To avoid this, you can consolidate the affected content into a single, comprehensive resource.
Take action on this about once per quarter.
5. Managing Technical SEO
Technical SEO maintenance involves optimizing your website’s backend elements and following website development best practices to ensure everything works correctly. This is of utmost importance because it ensures visitors have a positive user experience, and search engines can easily crawl and index your site.
You should assess your site health frequently, at least once or twice a month.
Check out our comprehensive guide to technical SEO for a deeper dive into this pillar of ongoing SEO maintenance, including a breakdown of the SEO audit process.
Examples of technical SEO factors to check up on include:
- Site speed
- Mobile-friendliness
- XML sitemaps
- Crawl errors
- Redirect chains
- 404 errors
- Broken links
- HTTPS security
Tools like Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, and Ahrefs can help you manage technical SEO.
6. Staying Ahead with Market and Keyword Research
If you want to ensure that a golden opportunity never passes you by, you must stay continuously engaged with learning about your niche and the content marketing sphere.
Read news from trusted publications and follow industry influencers to keep up to date. This will help you spot emerging topics, adapt to new SEO best practices, and cater to changing customer preferences.
Use your knowledge to inform your monthly keyword research processes and resulting content strategy.
Additionally, incorporate market research strategies like these:
- Use tools like Google Trends and Buzzsumo to track what’s currently popular and emerging in your field.
- Monitor your competitors to identify new topics using tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs.
- Gather audience feedback and insights using tools like SurveyMonkey or Hotjar.
7. Upholding a Consistent Publishing Schedule
Maintaining a regular output of fresh content is essential for preserving your domain authority and keeping a strong standing with search engines. Consistency signals to search engines and visitors that your site is active and authoritative.
The frequency of your publishing schedule will depend on your capacity and what you can comfortably stick to. However, you should aim to post 1-2 pieces of SEO content weekly at a minimum.
Tip: Programmatic SEO can be a resource-friendly way to publish hundreds of useful posts per month.
Additionally, repurposing content for other platforms can help you get more value out of existing content. For example, you can use a webinar as a basis for a blog post or vice versa.
Posting regularly on social media platforms, and engaging with your audience, assures potential customers that your business is active and legitimate.
8. Managing Your Backlink Profile
The role of backlinks in SEO has evolved since the days of buying and farming backlinks. Search engines now value backlink quality over quantity when determining your domain authority.
Meaning?
A few high-quality backlinks from reputable sites are far more valuable than numerous low-quality ones.
As part of SEO maintenance, aim to review your backlink profile at least quarterly to stay on top of any issues and capitalize on new opportunities.
Use tools like Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, Moz, and GSC to identify and disavow any low-quality or spammy links that could harm your site’s credibility.
To build on your backlink profile and acquire high-quality links, focus on producing top-notch content that people want to link to organically. Newsworthy PR content, white papers, original research, and other unique content are the best at attracting valuable backlinks.
By now you should have a solid understanding of what SEO looks like as an ongoing practice.
Next, we’ll address some questions you may still have about the realities of executing an ongoing SEO strategy.
9. Maintaining Local SEO
Local SEO is a powerful way to boost your SEO efforts. It focuses on improving your search engine ranking for location-specific searches.
This aspect of an SEO campaign also requires ongoing maintenance beyond the initial setup.
Consider implementing the following long-term local SEO best practices in your digital marketing strategy:
- Regularly updating your listing on Google My Business and other directories to reflect current hours, services, contact information, and location details
- Brainstorming local keywords as part of your content strategy and monitor the search engine ranking of local terms
- Collaborating with community businesses or media outlets to build local backlinks
6 Ongoing SEO Frequently Asked Questions
When deciding on the best way to tackle ongoing SEO processes, you should consider factors like cost, in-house capacity, tools, and more.
The following questions and answers should provide further clarity:
1. How Do Ongoing SEO And One-Time SEO Differ?
One-time SEO involves initial optimizations designed to establish a strong foundation for your website’s visibility. This includes tasks like:
- Identifying relevant keywords and integrating them into your site’s content, meta tags, and headings.
- Technical setup and website development to ensure your site works well, has proper indexing, a clear URL structure, and optimized site speed.
- On-page SEO to Craft optimized title tags, meta descriptions, and internal linking structures.
- Initial content creation to develop cornerstone content that targets key topics and user intents.
While this initial activity is absolutely critical for an SEO jumpstart, it’s really just the bare minimum to get on search engines’ radars and establish a good user experience.
Ongoing SEO entails sustained improvements and adaptation to keep your site competitive over time.
2. How Long Do I Need SEO For?
SEO typically begins to show results within 4-12 months. However, to reap ongoing rewards, continuous SEO efforts are essential. Just like any fundamental aspect of your business, sustained SEO ensures long-term growth.
Psst: If you’re looking for SEO results in weeks — not months, contact the experts at Startup Voyager. We’ll help you 10X your traffic and conversions in no time!
3. Can I Do Ongoing SEO In-House?
Yes, you can manage ongoing SEO in-house, but it requires significant resources, expertise, time, and financial investment.
However, hiring an agency that offers SEO services comes with benefits like access to specialized expertise, advanced tools, and a proven track record.
4. How Much Does Ongoing SEO Cost?
Hiring an in-house SEO team can run you tens of thousands of dollars a month.
On the other hand, SEO agencies can cover tool and salary costs because they have multiple paying clients and can use one tool for many portfolios. The average starting cost is around $2,000/month, but it can go lower or much higher for advanced enterprise SEO services.
5. What Tools Do I Need For Ongoing SEO?
Effective ongoing SEO requires a range of tools to monitor, analyze, and optimize your website and content performance. You can create a toolkit that suits your needs.
Here are some helpful tool types with examples:
- Keyword Research: Ahrefs, SEMrush
- Analytics and Tracking: Google Analytics, Google Search Console
- Backlink Analysis: Moz, Majestic
- Competitor Analysis: SpyFu, SimilarWeb
- User Experience (UX) Testing: Hotjar, Crazy Egg
- Local SEO: BrightLocal, Moz Local
6. Why Did My SEO Stop Working?
There are many potential reasons why you might experience a sudden drop or slow decline in organic website traffic, or impressions without clicks. Algorithm updates, technical issues, or shifts in user behavior can all play a role.
Ongoing SEO efforts will help you identify, address, and avoid these issues.
7. What Other Related Ongoing Tasks Are Important?
There are numerous related tasks that, while not directly related to SEO, play a big role in supporting an SEO campaign.
For example:
- Website design: Regular website maintenance and a clean, user-friendly website design improve user experience and site performance, positively impacting rankings.
- Email marketing: Regular email marketing campaigns can drive traffic to your website, boost engagement, and indirectly support ongoing SEO efforts.
- Google ads: Paid search ads, like Google ads, can complement organic efforts by driving immediate traffic while SEO strategies gain traction.
- Social media management: Engaging with users, sharing recent posts on social media, and other social media marketing activities can drive traffic and amplify your content’s reach.
- Reputation management: Monitoring and improving how your business is perceived online helps build trust and authority, which search engines favor. Reputation management includes responding to positive and negative reviews across various platforms and review sites.
Ongoing SEO: A Smart Strategy, Not Just a Routine
SEO needs to be an ongoing process — a long-term, proactive mission to maintain and enhance your website’s performance continuously.
But you shouldn’t see SEO as a chore or an accessory. Ongoing SEO is a fundamental tool for your business’s success and growth.
Thankfully, unlike some core business areas, there is a shortcut you can take to reap the benefits of ongoing SEO without shoulding all the burden. You can partner with an SEO specialist for ongoing SEO services — SEO experts like us!
At Startup Voyager, we specialize in conversion and growth-focused SEO. We not only drive results in a matter of weeks but also provide ongoing SEO services with a meticulous, data-informed approach.
Contact us for a consultation and let our SEO experts take care of you so you can focus on your core competencies.