SEO Maintenance: Essential Steps to Keep Your Rankings Strong

You already know that SEO is a long-term investment. It takes 6-12 months to design and implement a successful SEO strategy. You can see the first results a lot quicker, but the full kick requires patience and maintained effort.

Unfortunately, there is often the wrong belief that just because it takes a lot of time, you only have to do it once and forever bathe in traffic and sales. That’s not how it works. 

Think of it like driving a car. 

It takes a lot of energy to get going and accelerate up to highway speeds. When you build momentum, you can let off the gas and coast for a while. But eventually, the car will slow down and stop. 

But at 10-15% throttle, you can keep going just as fast for hundreds of miles until you run out of gas or absolutely can’t hold it anymore. 

That’s SEO maintenance for you! When you finally see the first rankings come through and the curves climbing up, it’s important to just keep moving. All you need is a little bit of gas for a long, smooth ride. 

What that “little bit of gas” looks like for SEO:

• Monitoring your rankings for fluctuations and traffic for sudden drops
• Doing timely technical checks and fixing problems before they turn into disasters
• Continuously optimizing your pages and improving experiences for your visitors
• Refreshing your content and re-aligning it with searchers’ intent
• Keeping tabs on what your competition is doing

Okay, if we’re all good at 3rd-grade physics, it’s time to keep it moving with this article and explore SEO maintenance in detail. 

If you care more about the how and less about the why, click here to skip the next section.

Why Care About SEO Maintenance?

It’s cheaper! 

Spirited driving takes more gas, right? Acceleration, deceleration, and rapid changes in direction take additional energy, so your mileage drops.

It’s the same with SEO. Putting in all the effort to rank a website only to let those rankings decay over time is not an efficient use of your marketing budget. 

It’s much more cost-effective to continue refreshing content and maintaining those positions than to pump them up after each crash. Plus, search engines tend to reward consistency. By maintaining your SEO, you can grow your reach without expending additional resources.

So, just keep it moving!

But why does search performance decay? 

That’s the real question, isn’t it? 

The quick answer is that nothing in SEO is ever stationary. Search trends, websites, and algorithms change, and it’s a race between you and your competitors to adapt. 

Let’s look into the four main moving parts. 

1. The SERP Is Not a Static System

Trends change. Content becomes less relevant over time, and search performance decays. 

It doesn’t happen overnight or to every page, but if you stop updating your website now, your search performance will likely decrease by the end of the year.

So, you’ve got to keep it moving and remain fresh and relevant to your target audience’s search intent.

2. Websites Are Dynamic Too

Modern websites, especially WordPress ones, are created from different independent parts – hosting environment, content management system, various plugins, and 3rd party software. On top of that, you’ve got different people and teams following different procedures and quality standards. 

Over time, things will just break. Keeping everything and everybody synced and working seamlessly requires ongoing maintenance.

Little bumps like 404 errors, broken images, and orphaned pages will cause individual pages to not perform up to their full potential. But the big crashes, like somebody butchering the robots.txt file, or getting hacked, can drop your entire business out of search overnight with long-lasting consequences.

You’ve got to keep it moving and stay on top of technical maintenance so you can react to problems before they affect your search performance. And maybe you can avoid the next disaster before it happens. 

3. Ranking Algorithms Evolve Constantly

In trying to present searchers with the most accurate and up-to-date information, search engines constantly adjust their algorithms. While they usually result in a better search experience overall, algorithm updates may wreak havoc on pages and websites that are perfectly fine. 

These days, they don’t seem as disruptive, or maybe I’m just on the right side of the equation more often than not. 

When a core update hits you, the only thing you can do is adapt to the new rules and keep it moving. 

4. Your Competitors Are Not Idling

Your competitors are fighting for the same traffic and sales you are. They’re ferocious, and they’ll use all the tricks to get ahead. 

If you let off the gas for too long, they’ll be running laps around you, hoarding all of the clicks and leaving you with scraps. You’ve got to keep it moving!

The DCP SEO Maintenance Process

Truth be told, we don’t have a dedicated “seo maintenance service” and don’t follow a special “seo maintenance checklist”.

Maintaining your content and website is baked into our SEO services from the get-go. We believe sustained effort and persistence set “evergreen” apart from the “one-hit wonders,” and we pride ourselves on achieving lasting success for our clients.

Here’s how we ensure your SEO is always on par with the latest trends and developments in digital marketing.

1. Track and Monitor Key Performance Indicators

You can’t fix what you can’t measure. The first step to SEO maintenance is enabling tracking and monitoring of your key performance indicators. 

• Google Search Console tracks your search performance—impressions, clicks, keywords, and CTR. GSC also signals you if your website experiences problems with indexing, redirects, 404 and 500 errors, Core Web Vitals, structured data, and more! 
• Google Analytics helps track traffic sources, conversions, and user behavior data. 

These tools are completely free, and data comes straight from the source. You need them configured for your website ASAP. 

Beyond that, you need a reliable way to track keyword ranking positions. Ahrefs and Semrush are the leaders in the market and each offers an expansive set of tools for SEO research and tracking—keywords, competition, backlinks, site health, and more.

As an agency, we use both to cover more blank spots in our data. But you only really need one of them. Both are paid SaaS platforms, but if SEO is key to your business success, the investment is worth it. 

To optimize the user experience and conversion funnels on your website, you need a tool that can create heatmaps and track how visitors engage with elements of your page:

• Microsoft Clarity is free and sufficiently powerful. 
• Depending on your needs and scale, there are paid options like HotJar. 

The data these tools gather feeds into our various audits and checks. 

On the home front, our SEO Nik built a handy weekly dashboard in Looker Studio that pulls in data from the Search Console for all our clients.

Next, we have the weekly checks spreadsheet. Every week, the SEO and On-Page Specialists check every website individually across our tracking platforms:

• Google Search Console.
• Google Analytics.
• Ahrefs rank traffic.
• Ahrefs site audit.

Additionally, I check every website by hand to ensure every page type loads correctly, on-page SEO elements work as intended, mobile renders fine, and so on.

The small time investment from the team each week provides us with early warnings if something is going wrong in the SERPs so that we can address it immediately.

This process has allowed us to discover hacked sites, broken GA tracking codes, indexing and canonical issues, etc. 

Finally, we produce Monthly SEO Reports and Quarterly Business Reports for our clients, which is another opportunity to dive into the data and identify wins, losses, and trends.

2. Conduct Regular Technical SEO Audits

Technical problems like poor crawlability, duplicate content, URL structure, and so on, affect the entire site and can easily tank rankings across the board. 

That’s why, at the start of almost every project, we perform our suite of technical SEO audits to establish a baseline and assess the health of the website. These include:

• The Page Mapping Audit. This combines data from six sources mapping ranking and traffic data to each URL we’ve discovered. We then spend time categorizing ALL URLs and develop a broad understanding of how each content section performs in search and where traffic and sales generally come from.
• The Website Health Audit. This focuses on technical health and on-page optimization. We look at crawling and indexing, usability, security, URL structure, canonicalization, and many other things. Depending on the client, we perform between 70 and 83 individual checks. 

Any severe issues are resolved first to create a strong foundation for our future editorial and SEO work. 

We then continue to maintain technical SEO over time. Every week we look at the automatic Ahrefs Site Audit and Google Search Console. Since the data is incorporated in the first audits, any deviation or new issues will be looked into and assessed.

Depending on the needs of the website, we conduct more specialized audits like:

• The Internal Linking Audit. This analyzes the navigation efficiency, crawlability, and overall internal link distribution. Effective internal linking is immensely powerful for boosting pages (especially those buried lower in the site structure) and spreading domain power around your site. It’s an integral part of our SEO process.
• The Structured Data Audit. This is especially useful for ecommerce stores. With Google rolling out new SERP features all the time, structured data is an essential tool to rise above the noise and get your products seen. 

We’ll occasionally recrawl websites to keep up with SEO maintenance. 

We’ll repeat any of the audits as necessary, but after the initial rounds of technical optimization, we’re more likely to focus on individual pages as we work on them editorially.

3. Optimize On-Page Elements Continuously

In our initial work on a page, we select a target keyword and secondary keywords we want to rank for. 

We optimize the URL, H1 and heading structure, meta title, and body content accordingly. Oh, and we write a killer piece of content, too. 

We monitor the page over time and see how it fairs for our selection of keywords. The initial targeting gets you within the ballpark but iterative SEO maintenance and optimization is the way to extract the most performance out of every piece of content.

For example, our Content Specialist Martin wrote an article on content writing tools that currently ranks 12th for “seo content writing software”. This is a decent keyword with 500 searches per month. There’s a traffic potential if we get on the front page of the SERP. 

Here’s the interesting bit: “seo content writing software” is not mentioned anywhere on the page. Given that it already ranks at the top of page 2, there’s a good chance we can push it a few positions by just including the keyword in a paragraph or heading. 

There’s a bunch more we can add:

• seo tools for content writing: 300 searches per month—ranks 12th.
• seo writing tools: 250 searches per month—ranks 13th.
• tools for content writing: 150 searches per month—ranks 11th.

Thanks to Ahrefs, it’s easy to look for and identify similar opportunities and optimize your article accordingly. Here’s how:

1. Inspect the page in Ahrefs
2. Go to the organic keywords tag
3. Filter for positions 11 – 20
4. Filter to remove branded keywords

Don’t overcook it! You can’t include every possible keyword. Be subtle with your additions and ensure you don’t make the article sound unnatural and forced. 

We call this process the Underperforming Keyword Audit and it’s one of several keyword research activities we perform regularly for our clients. 

Regardless if we’re working on a new page or doing SEO maintenance on older content, our on-page SEO services go above and beyond just optimizing keywords. They include:

Image Selection and Optimization

• Only use helpful and impactful images that add context and reinforce the text. Don’t add images just for the sake of having images on the page.
• Don’t forget the SEO essentials—descriptive file name, title, and alt text.
• Optimize the resolution, image format, and file size to reduce load time and bandwidth. 
• Utilize caching and lazy-load technologies to further optimize the experience. Go for a CDN if your host supports it.

Page Speed

Page speed is directly linked with search performance. Rather, unsatisfactory load time is a guarantee for poor user experience and reduced sales.

It’s fair to say any investment in a faster website will return the investment quickly. 

Images are often the biggest payload, but not the only one—embedded videos and other iframe/3rd party resources, and large amounts of scripts will take a toll on page speed. 

Worst of all, a poor CMS setup and a bad hosting service can make for an incredibly slow site. No amount of SEO maintenance can fix that. 

Use the Page Speed Insights tool to audit several pages on your website.

Mobile Responsiveness

With more than half of website visitors coming through a mobile device it’s pure suicide to leave the mobile version of your page an afterthought. 

Thankfully, modern platforms and themes have largely solved that problem and usually, new websites render decently on small screens. 

But usually doesn’t mean always—especially if you’re using visual page builders. It’s easy to forget about checking the mobile version only to later discover the layout looks horrible on your phone.

More often it’s the little things—a heading becoming too big for small screens, a button disappearing, big tables unable to constrain to the small width of the screen (notoriously hard btw), images causing layout issues…

As part of my on-page process, I always check the page on my phone to see if it is public or the browser simulation if not. An extra two minutes of my time is well worth the peace of mind, knowing all page visitors will get a good experience. 

Accessibility and User Experience

Beyond mobile, think about how your target audience will interact with your site and experience your content. 

• Is your navigation intuitive? Can visitors quickly find the page they’re looking for?
• Is the text readable? Good font-size? Sufficient contrast with the background color?
• Can you scan the page effectively and locate the section you’re interested in?
• Are buttons easily clickable? Are forms easy to use?
• Calls to action not overly aggressive and disruptive?

Some of these are site-wide elements that impact the overall design of the website. Others are dead simple, like proper text formatting:

• No walls of text.
• Progressive heading structure.
• Intelligent use of bold, italics, and lists to break up big sections. 

Structured Data

For ecommerce searches, the organic section can be buried under several sets of shopping widgets, merchant listings, ads, and other SERP features. Even if you rank in the top 3 results, your store can remain invisible to potential buyers.

Ecommerce schema is no longer an option – you have to run structured data and optimize for as many rich snippet features as you possibly can to remain competitive.

Each of these items has a small impact on the search performance of a page, but together implemented across your site, they move the needle dramatically. 

4. Update and Optimize Content Frequently

When a little optimization doesn’t cut it, it’s time for a content refresh. 

Evergreen content is not green forever. Not without timely SEO maintenance that is. Content simply decays over time. Search trends change. Facts and statistics age. New knowledge appears to replace the old. 

Thus, Google prefers fresh content that is directly relevant to the searcher’s intent. 

But too often businesses confuse that with publishing new content all the time. We’ve seen many blogs that publish overlapping articles regurgitating the same topics over and over again.

Before we write a single word for a new client, we go through an extensive Content Audit. We take a large swathe of pages and compare rankings, traffic data, and keyword search intent against the content, then we prescribe actions like “Refresh”, “Full Rewrite”, “Target with Links”, etc. 

It could be as easy as rewriting a section to match the search intent of the main keyword or changing the keyword targeting altogether to reduce internal competition. 

While the content audit takes a lot of effort, updating content is many times cheaper and faster than writing from scratch.

After the initial round of content optimization, we’ll continue to maintain keyword rankings by regularly looking at underperforming keywords and making adjustments. 

5. Analyze Competitors and Adjust Your Strategy

SEO doesn’t happen in a vacuum. 

There are tens of thousands, if not millions, of pages competing for every keyword you decide to target. They’re all after the same thing—page-one rankings. 

There’s a lot of great content published on every imaginable topic. Content that’s perfectly accurate and valid. However, there are only 10 results on page one. 

Maintaining your SEO positions is only possible by rigorously researching the competition and ruthlessly reverse-engineering their content to make yours better more favorable to the algorithm.

We have several processes that focus on competition research. 

The Keyword Gap Analysis compares keyword rankings between your site and top competitors in your niche to uncover opportunities you haven’t yet explored. We perform this occasionally, even for long-term clients, to maintain SEO and remain competitive.

The Feature Snippet Audit aims to identify keywords where we can try to rank for the featured snippet shown at the top of the SERP. 

We select pages that rank on page one for terms that display a featured snippet. Again, Ahrefs is most useful for such research. 

Then, we closely emulate the currently ranking featured snippet within the article we want to rank with. Usually, it’s a matter of updating a paragraph, adding a specific list, or changing a heading to match the keyword.

The success rate is not very high, but the effort required is low, and doing it at scale frequently lands us a few featured snippets. 

Beyond these specialized audits, we’ve baked in competition research as part of our standard keyword research tasks.

Every time they prepare an outline for the editorial team, our SEO Specialists take into account the entire SERP, look at competitors’ pages, and put together the ultimate strategy for dominating this set of keywords. 

6. Keep Your Eyes On Developing Tech

Google Search is changing, and it’s not just the algorithm. The broad adoption of AI hasn’t passed by Big G. 

For example, Google started displaying an AI Overview panel that provides intelligent answers to some search queries. You can think of it as the successor to the featured snippet, but the content is synthesized by Google’s artificial intelligence instead of borrowed from websites.

The SERP is getting more and more cramped, too. The traditional layout of 10 results per page is no more. There’s a lot more stuff at the top of the results page:

• Knowledge graphs
• Image panels
• Product listings and shopping tabs
• People Also Ask sections
• And ads… can’t forget about the ads…

Each of these is an opportunity to gain more visibility and clicks. But not taking action will throw you out of the corner and into a ditch with the rest of the organic results. 

Finally, think beyond search engines. ChatGPT and other LLMs could revolutionize how we search by replacing traditional search results with conversation-based personalized answers.

We’re already seeing an increase in website traffic from AI tools. 

Will this be the new frontier for search marketing? We’ll see…But you’ve got to keep your eyes on the road and adapt to the changing conditions ahead. 

Don’t Watch the Race From the Side of the Road. Keep SEO Moving With DCP!

It’s very rewarding when we see graphs like these because we know how much continued effort and brainpower went into winning those rankings. 

But when the fireworks are over and the champagne is empty, we get right back to it, because keeping those first-page positions requires ongoing SEO maintenance. 

It all boils down to: “just keeping it moving.” That means:

• Keep defining and monitoring your KPIs.
• Keep improving the technical performance of your website, CMS, and hosting service.
• Keep optimizing pages and visitors’ experiences.
• Keep updating your content and enhancing your expertise.
• Keep snooping into your competitors’ business.
• Keep raising the bar on quality.

And the clicks will keep coming. 

If you’re developing your SEO strategy now make sure to bake in SEO maintenance in the long-term process. 

If you’ve been coasting for a while and your website is losing momentum in search, step on the gas or call in the reinforcements. 

DCP offers a full range of SEO services for ecommerce stores looking to generate traffic and sales from organic search. 

From market research to technical optimization and end-to-end content production and publishing, our team can push your store across the finish line and keep you one lap ahead of your competitors.

Learn more about our ecommerce SEO services and contact us before you’re on the side of the road!