This little article is not about how to plan or perform great SEO … for that topic, we’d need many, many big articles, probably a whole book! Here we’re just trying to give you (the business owner, CEO or manager) a few good tips what to look out for after SEO has been implemented.

As we repeatedly mentioned (read our SEO vs. PPC article), SEO is not a one-shot deal. Ranking progress, status and SEO quality requires constant ongoing monitoring and fine tuning, for 3 reasons:

a) Never rest on your laurels. Nothing is ever perfect. There’s always place for new ideas and constant improvements.

b) Google’s rules and algorithms can (and do) change, sometimes drastically. Websites have to adjust if they want to stay in the loop (and avoid getting downgraded).

c)  Your competitors aren’t sleeping. They spend a lot of time and money keeping and improving their good search rankings. Can you afford to stay behind?

Yes, you do need an SEO expert for the ongoing follow-up process. But website SEO monitoring, while of course not free of charge, is not necessarily expensive. What’s expensive is  not  to monitor.

Your SEO specialist, in-house or on contract, will the check the website’s dynamic progress and make the necessary changes and updates. Still, it’s good for any business owner or manager to know, in broad outlines, what’s involved. Then you can have an intelligent talk with your SEO person and address the issues that are most urgent or important for you. The list below is a decent guide but (sorry!) can’t be complete in this space.

So, here goes (in short points).

1. Use   Google Analytics   to pinpoint any traffic problems, duration of site (and page) visits, bounce rates, etc.
2. Keep checking and updating the keywords for which the website wants to be found.
3. Check your rankings (on Google, Yahoo and Bing) for each of your main keywords. For your rankings in other countries, check those search engines’ international websites for results.
4. Check the same for your main competitors.
5. Verify how many pages of your site have been indexed, performing Google Site search. Simply type into the browser bar the following: site:www.mywebsite.myextension, adjust for your website’s details, and hit Enter. Google will display all your web pages they have indexed.   This is not a cure-all but it will give you a good idea about how well your site is structured and linked.
6. Make sure you don’t have broken links within your website. Broken links make it a frustrating user experience for your visitors to navigate (read our article on user experience and user-friendliness), throw search engine crawls off the track, and can even hurt your site’s search rankings.
7. Check your external links for inaccessible content. You don’t want outgoing links that are “dead”.
8. Using appropriate tools, make sure your back links (i.e.: links pointing to your website) are desirable for you. Low quality back links can hurt your website.

We hope this little article was useful for you.

Question? Comments? Challenges? Reach out to us. We’re good listeners and are here to help.