Why Your SEO Strategy Should be Long-Term?
Every once in a while, we get a call or an email from companies wanting to do a one off SEO campaign. They believe that doing a proper keyword research, adding meta tags and content, fixing technical issues is all that’s required. I don’t blame them. When I first started doing SEO about 9 years ago, I ranked lofasofa.com #1 on Google for the term “sofa bed” within a few months. #2 was Ikea and #3 was Sears. The strategy of keyword research/tags/content was good enough then so I can see why people would still believe that a one off SEO campaign is a good idea. However, when it comes to SEO, you should think long term. Here’s why:
Reasons for a Long-Term SEO Campaign
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Algorithms are changing
According to Moz, Google changes its algorithm between 500 to 600 times a year. That’s right. That’s almost twice a day! Here is a link to the history of Google Algorithm changes where you can look at all the past changes and maybe (but hopefully not) match a time of a decrease of organic traffic with one of these updates.
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It takes time to rank high, especially for competitive keywords.
When doing keyword research, there should be different categories of keywords you want to go after. The “Shoot for the stars” broad generic keywords (1 or 2 words) that would bring a huge amount of traffic to your site. Those keywords are of course crazy competitive and will take months, if not years to rank for. The “Compromise” keywords which are a bit longer keywords (generally 3 to 5 words) that would bring a significant amount of traffic to your site, and perhaps a more qualified audience than generic broad keywords. Those keywords will be more easily attainable. The last group will be the “Low Hanging Fruits” which are long tail keywords (6 words+). They have a lower search volume but tend to bring very qualified visitors to your site.
After the keyword research, you will need to write content, expose that content to the right audience to gather links and slowly become an authority in the market place. All of that takes time and is not achieved over night.
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Your competition will outrank you
Say your site was already pretty well optimized and we do a one off campaign and do manage to get you towards the top of Google search results. What do you think will happen in the next few months? Your rankings will slowly start to drop and you will be gone from the 1st page before you know it. Your competition won’t start trying to be #1 so neither should do.
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New tools/updates are always coming up
Things change. In our industry, things changes FAST! Google just launched Accelerated Mobile Pages and it can give you a huge boost from mobile devices yet only 23% of SEO companies are implementing that change. Links in Wikipedia suddenly are up for grab (a new dead link or citation is needed). Use a tool like Wiki Grabber to check these opportunities on a monthly basis or those valuable links will get snatched by your competitors. Adapt or die sounds a bit dramatic but is not far off the reality of the SEO world. And that’s not doable with a one off SEO campaign.
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Keyword trends may change rapidly
You have been in the industry for a while. You can guess what people are typing because they’ve done it forever, right? Wrong! Here is an example for one of our client Pardon Services Canada where suddenly “Record Suspensions” became more popular than “Pardon Services”. Adapt or die. Am I repeating myself?
We could go on forever but I think you get the picture. Think long term for SEO, keep working and tweaking your SEO campaigns. There are no shortcuts when it comes to SEO.
Need Help Managing your SEO Campaign?
Our SEO experts at 1UP can help you optimize your SEO Strategy for long-term growth so you can get the most out of it.