SEO is something that most webmasters know they need, but that often gets overlooked in the general push for content marketing and social media marketing. The assumption is that if you are promoting your site, you are doing SEO. While there is some crossover, the truth is that if you want to get the best results you need to take a more proactive stance with your SEO, and you need to monitor the work that you are doing.
The Data is There
Fortunately, there is plenty of data out there, for free, for webmasters to use in their SEO efforts. Google’s own Webmaster Tools, for example, provides a detailed, free rolling snapshot of your website’s performance over the last few months, so if you perform regular audits it is a valuable tool for flagging up potential issues with your website.
SEO Is Always Changing
The world of SEO is always evolving, and what worked last year may no longer be as effective. Even if you have not been using any “tricks” in your SEO efforts, there are always potential issues that you should be mindful of. For example, Google may erroneously flag up some of your incoming links as being “unnatural” or might penalise you for a problem with the navigation on your mobile website that has so far gone unnoticed. These issues will be identified during an audit, giving you the chance to fix them, and hopefully recover some of that lost traffic.
Smarter Promotion
Engaging in paid search marketing, content marketing and aggressive social media promotion if your SEO foundation is not sound is like trying to keep a sinking ship afloat by bailing out the water without also taking the time to fix the hole in the hull. You will see results, but as soon as you stop your promotion efforts, those results will dry up. If you build on your SEO at the same time as doing all the other work, then your business will not be solely dependent on paid marketing. That’s why services such as wsimk.co.uk are so useful – they help webmasters to build that solid foundation.
Today, SEO is as much about reaching the right people as it is about growing your search engine presence. Hiring a company to do an SEO audit in Buckinghamshire would help you to improve your local SEO for that region, and you may want assistance from another company to target another geographic area – because the local differences may be more profound than you think.
A few years ago, SEO was purely a technical challenge, but now there are so many other factors to take into account, including things like usability, the quality of your links, and the quality of your content. You cannot view SEO as a one-off task. It is something that you should always be working on, and that you should be testing, improving, and re-evaluating as you go for best results.