Your website needs SEO maintenance!

In order for a website to be successful, you need to have traffic going to it. You need an audience! That’s why SEO is so very important. Unfortunately, a lot of aspects of SEO are hard work. Kind of boring even. And although these SEO tasks can be boring, your website needs you to execute them. Your website needs SEO love. I am going to write a blog series about all the SEO tasks that are hard work: copywriting, internal linking, updating old content, fixing broken links, and so on. In this first post of the SEO love series, I’ll explain what SEO love is, how you can give your site the love it deserves, and what else you can expect of this series.

What is SEO love? 

SEO love is just a fancy term for SEO maintenance. Your site needs maintenance, the SEO of your site needs maintenance. You need to do a lot of different things in order to keep your site performing well in the search engines. You can’t just do SEO once and then forget about it. It is just like watering your plants or feeding your pets: you need to take care of your website. It needs your love! 

For many of you, your website is your most important advertising mechanism. It’s how people find your business, it’s where customers buy your stuff. For lots of you, your website is part of your livelihood, indispensable for making a living. Your website is important and driving traffic to your website is important: so give your website the love it deserves! 

Read more: Why should you optimize your content for search engines? »

Especially love your growing website 

Especially if your site is growing, you’ll need to put some extra effort into your SEO love. If your site is big, Google will have a hard time crawling through your pages. You’ll be more likely to face problems like keyword cannibalization and orphaned content. Users (and Google!) have a higher chance of getting lost on your site. If your site has been around for a longer period, you’ll probably have stale and outdated content.  A larger website needs regular updates, it needs cleaning up, it needs… SEO love. 

How do you love your site? 

So how do you show your site that you care? What kind of things should you be doing? In each of my blogs, I’ll discuss a specific SEO task. But before we get started on all the specific tasks you need to do, it is important to make sure to have some time in your calendar to actually do the work. Because if you fail to plan, you plan to fail :-). Make sure to plan time for yourself to do the work. And, make sure to take time to regularly evaluate and adapt your SEO strategy.  

Make time in your calendar 

SEO tasks need to be or become part of your routine. You need to keep your site SEO fit. You clean up your house every week, and you should also make sure to clean up your site. How often you need to work on it, depends on the size of your website. Smaller sites don’t necessarily need to be cleaned up every week, in that case, a monthly clean-up could do as well.  

When you add content to your site, you need to take some time to update your internal linking strategy, look at outdated content, and fix broken links. So make time in your calendar to work on your SEO, to execute little tasks that’ll help with your rankings. In the blog posts in this SEO series, I’ll tell you all about the tasks you should be working on.  

Evaluate and adapt 

Your site is changing. Every day. Your audience changes as well. Google changes, your competition changes, and even the world around us changes. In order to adapt to all these changes, you need to regularly evaluate what you’re doing. Also when it comes to your content SEO strategy. Are you creating the right types of content? Perhaps the blog post you were writing 5 years ago should be replaced by videos. And is your keyword strategy still valid? Are your customers using the same search terms? Or did their vocabulary or their wishes change?

If you really love your site, you need to make sure it adapts to changes in the world, to the changes of Google, and to the changes of your audience. That’s the only way it will remain successful. In my blog series, I will also help you decide just how and when to evaluate your SEO strategy. I will help you to figure out questions like: what changes should you be making in order to remain successful over time? And how do I adapt my strategy to new technologies?

About this new blog series 

I love SEO. I love writing. Ergo, I love writing about SEO. I recently stepped down as the CEO of Yoast and want to focus on more creative things. This blog series is one of those things. I notice that a lot of aspects of SEO aren’t necessarily sexy. It’s mostly hard work. But you really need to do that work (or let someone else do it for you ;-)). That’s why I’m going to write about all those things.  

In each SEO love blog post, I’ll explain a certain SEO task you should be doing in order to keep your site ranking high in the search engines. I’ll also explain why you should do that task and how you could benefit from it. And then, I’ll explain – in detail- just how you should execute the SEO task properly. I’ll use examples from my own work and my own life.

I hope this series will help all of you bloggers, all of you writers, and all you website owners with growing sites. I hope to keep you excited and motivated for your SEO tasks and I hope to help you improve their rankings even further. Let’s spread the SEO love! 

Keep reading: The first post in my SEO love series: Why you should add links to a new post ASAP »

SEO love series