Search engine optimization is a prized component of any brand’s marketing arsenal. After all, what other method can be pursued for practically no money, create tons of traffic and passively continue to deliver results for months or even years? While the biggest fruits of SEO labor take time and patience to obtain, they generally will keep delivering as long as you keep an eye on your niche and evolving search engine trends.

Nevertheless, there are some aspects of SEO that require periodic maintenance in order to continue delivering results. Today, we’ll look at a few and explain why this maintenance is so important.

Audits, Audits, Audits

Arguably one of the most important aspects of recurring SEO maintenance involves audits. There are many different types of audits that can be done to evaluate a website’s current SEO status, but a few are crucial.

On-page SEO audits are great at discovering whether any specific plugins, on-page elements or code has recently become broken or otherwise detrimental to your SEO endeavours. Over time, search engines change and these audits may uncover issues that previously weren’t a problem. Another type of audit is link auditing, which uncovers whether you’re pinging links that are broken or otherwise damaging to your SEO efforts. Last but not least, technical audits can also be performed at regular intervals to discover whether search engines have found any problems with your site (via Google Search Console as one example).

Keyword Research

On a regular basis, it is important to sit down and analyze your current keyword targets. Some people believe that an initial round of research will continue to deliver results forever: the reality couldn’t be further from the truth.

Ultimately, SERPs and niches in general change. While a particular keyword or SERP you’ve been targeting might have been a good bet six months ago, recent changes in search engine algorithms, current events and user behavior may all mean there are new opportunities that are more fruitful. By performing keyword research every few months, you can be sure that your brand is always pinging links and content aimed at the best SERPs in terms of value.

Performance Assessments

Unless your brain is literally a computer, keeping track of progress, various metrics and shifts in performance is not something that can be easily recalled. As time passes, remembering how your website performed – and how it’s performing now relative to that – becomes increasingly difficult.

This is why one of the most meaningful forms of SEO maintenance is performance assessments. By comparing how your website is performing relative to last year, last quarter, or any other time period relevant to your brand, you’ll be able to keep an eye on how all of your other strategies and tactics are working.

SEO isn’t a one-time deal: you must constantly be seeking to improve, monitor and – if necessary – change various strategies. By ensuring that you are conducting performance assessments, keyword research and a variety of audits every quarter or so, you’ll have a much better idea of where your website stands, where it can be improved and whether or not the current course of action is best.