The Gist
- SEO is a continuous process, not a one-time project. To be effective, SEO needs to be treated as a long-term, ongoing process rather than a series of independent, short-term projects. It requires regular attention and management due to constantly changing factors such as Google’s algorithm, your website’s content, and your competition.
- Quality content is crucial for SEO: Providing well-written, purposeful content is at the heart of any successful SEO strategy.
- Choosing the right SEO partner can enhance results: Working closely with an SEO agency or expert over a sustained period can lead to better results. As the SEO team becomes more familiar with your content and keywords, they can more effectively optimize your site.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a fundamental aspect of website management that is critical to build brand awareness and generate leads. If people can’t find your website content, then much of the efforts made around creating an excellent site and impactful content are effectively wasted.
Despite SEO’s importance, many digital marketing and web teams remain surprisingly unaware of SEO basics. For many, it still remains something of a dark art and a mysterious practice that requires deep expertise with constantly shifting requirements.
Due to a lack of internal skills as well as resourcing and budgetary constraints, many teams choose to rely on external expertise for SEO. This is often a sensible approach, especially as there are some SEO practices which can be quite specialist, but it can lead to some issues:
- SEO efforts and improvement tend to come in short, independent bursts based around engaging specialists on an ad hoc basis, rather than providing an ongoing and continuous SEO process.
- There are a lot of self-proclaimed SEO experts, but it can be hard for digital marketing teams to ascertain whether the advice and action they are receiving is successful or not.
- There is no transfer of skills to the digital marketing team in terms of awareness and knowledge of SEO practices.
The combination of these trends can lead to SEO that is less effective than it should be, and does not deliver the kind of long-term, continuous improvement in SEO that digital teams are looking for and that delivers tangible results.
Why Is Sustainable SEO Critical?
To get the best results it’s important to take a more sustainable and less short-term approach to SEO. Let’s look at some of the reasons for this.
Effective SEO Is a Moving Target
SEO doesn’t stay still. Improvements made that might be effective today may not necessarily still be effective in the future. Changes can happen across a number of different criteria that will impact SEO, including the way Google constructs its algorithm, changes to your own website or the content that feeds it, or even changes to your CMS. New keywords also come along and other websites can start to outperform you. For all these reasons and more, SEO is effectively a moving target that needs ongoing attention and management.
Related Article: State of SEO: Google Search Algorithm Updates for Q2 2023
SEO Is a Process Not a Project
Successful SEO is hard to achieve if you take a short-term view. Hiring an SEO consultant every so often isn’t going to cut it. It’s much more about delivering an ongoing process that continues to add new content that is optimized for SEO and builds on success.
The core of successful SEO is implementing everyday processes and practices that are part of the way you manage a website and its content, rather than activating a series of separate projects.
Content Is King
Providing well-written content that has a purpose is still at the center of any successful SEO strategy. Content can’t also only be about SEO — it has to appeal to your audiences to make them want to visit and then return to your site.
Any approach to SEO also needs to have an accompanying content strategy that defines your medium- to long-term goals for content and ensures it has value.
Related Article: Google Helpful Content Update Improves Customer Experience and SEO Strategy
Keeping Your Eyes on Your Data, With the Right Tools and Research
Successful SEO by its very nature is data-driven and therefore has a dependency on ensuring there are the right tools for reporting and keyword research. In particular, it’s important that your analytics package (for example Google Analytics) is configured in a way that aligns with your SEO goals and processes.
The SEO and analytics tools landscape is wide; having the right tools in place is an important component in establishing a more sustainable approach to SEO and utilizing your data to the fullest.
Picking the Right Partner and Sticking With Them
We believe SEO works best in a partnership. One thing we’ve found is that when an SEO agency or expert works together closely with a client over a sustained period of time, the SEO team gets to better know the types of content and specialist keywords that are going to resonate with a segmented audience.
At the same time, the marketing team will gain a better understanding of SEO practices, particularly if they are beginners and less experienced, but also potentially even if they have advanced knowledge. This can influence the way content is written and reviewed, so it is already partly SEO-optimized before being worked upon by an SEO agency.
Ultimately when the SEO team knows a target audience, and the marketing team knows more about SEO, it can better align content management practices with the SEO process, which ultimately leads to better SEO performance.
Learn how you can join our contributor community.
