You’ve put so much time and effort into your website’s SEO and you’re well on your way to ranking where you want in all the most relevant Google search results. First off, great job! Pat yourself on the back, because that’s no easy feat. But now that you know how to build a website with effective search engine optimization, you can’t just kick back and relax: if you stay complacent, you risk falling in your hard-earned Google rankings, and you certainly don’t want that. Here are five tips that can help you avoid dropping off in your Google rankings:
Post New Content to Keep Your Site Relevant
Google loves an accurate, up-to-date website, and the algorithm looks closely at recent website activity to judge this. If a website is frequently posting new content, Google knows that someone is “at the wheel” and can safely assume that the website is accurately showing info that’s relevant to users in Fall of 2021.
This is why we recommend publishing blog posts on a regular basis (usually monthly, bi-weekly, or even weekly), as this not only allows you to put relevant, useful, and timely information in front of your visitors, but also shows Google that your website is active and dedicated to providing content that Google’s search users will love.
Avoid Google Ranking Drops By Updating Your Old Site Content
Posting a new blog every month is an effective SEO practice, but it should always be paired with updating your standard site pages as well. Google may look kindly upon frequent new pages posted to your website, but it still crawls and ranks individual pages, and if your other pages (like Home pages, About pages, Product Info pages, etc) haven’t been updated in months or years, then you risk Google cataloging them as “out of date” and seeing a rankings drop as a result.
These changes need not be huge–tweaking copy, uploading new pictures, or adding new info can all help Google recognize that you’re ensuring every page on your website is useful, accurate, and up-to-date, and keep your Google rankings right where you want them.
Promote Your Best Content Consistently
A common SEO mistake many people make is to think of your site content is only for feeding the algorithm. Business owners write a blog post because they know Google wants to see updates and they want to rank for new keywords, but often forget that these posts are still intended to be marketing tools read and utilized by real people. So if you’re running monthly blogs, make sure those blogs are useful and relevant and promote them accordingly!
Promoting this content could mean sharing blog posts on your social pages, linking to useful pages from your email marketing campaigns, and generally working to drive eyeballs to those pages. By putting this content in front of more people, you can hopefully gain traction, build traffic to these posts, and maybe even get some useful backlinks that can bolster your SEO rankings even further. This isn’t just for your newest blog posts, either–marketing your website in this way can help maintain the search rankings for older pages and posts and ensure that they continue to work for you.
Keep Up to Date on SEO Best Practices for 2021
If you’ve taken any sort of time learning how to build a website with high Google search rankings, you undoubtedly already know that the SEO world is constantly changing. Standards (even–or especially–for small things like image formatting and meta-tags) are always in flux, and what works or doesn’t work to improve Google search rankings can be updated almost any time without warning.
This is why it’s important to make sure you know the best ways to improve your Google Ranking in 2021 (or whatever the current year may be as you read this). SEO tips and tricks that may have worked even last year may no longer be the best practices, and you may find that what was a perfectly optimized web page when you first built your site may now be at risk of falling off the Google search rankings. That’s why it’s worth periodically re-familiarizing yourself with SEO best practices, or reaching out to our digital marketing experts here at Skol Marketing, who work day-in and day-out to make sure they know the most up-to-date SEO standards.
Run an SEO Audit to Improve Google Search Rankings
Knowing the SEO best practices isn’t enough if you don’t even know if your site meets these standards or falls short. That’s where an SEO audit can help keep you from falling in the Google search rankings. A professional SEO audit involves combing through your site and identifying any areas for improvement in your site’s SEO. This could include testing site speeds, finding broken links, highlighting poor site formatting or images in non-optimal file types, etc, etc. By taking the findings from an SEO audit and using that info to make targeted changes to your website, you can ensure your pages continue to be optimized as best as possible and avoid seeing a drop in your Google search rankings.
A website SEO overhaul is always a huge project, and many business owners aren’t able to commit more time and energy into constantly updating the website to maintain those all-important Google search rankings. Fortunately, Skol Marketing’s team can help you with everything SEO, from audits to web updates to writing blog posts. If you’d prefer one-on-one guidance or would like to discuss how our assistance can help you protect your hard-earned Google search rankings, please don’t hesitate to contact the local SEO experts at Skol Marketing.
