maintain seo rankings

SEO is no exception to the belief that “Building something is hard, and Retaining success is even harder.” Therefore, many websites fail to retain their success for a long time after doing intense SEO and marketing and seeing positive results.

However, when your website has good authority, it will automatically come under the direct lens of the search engine, because Google gives more weightage to the authoritative websites and ranks them first. In this way, what happens after you earn prominence from the web spider?

Contrary to the general opinion that keywords alone help you stay on top, there are other essentials to maintain SEO rankings, and consistently will allow you to be in the spotlight. Yet, the key is to evolve and adapt to changing algorithms regularly.

Thus, here are a few things to consider to stay on top even after seeing the light of success in the SEO game.

1. Keep Your Site Updated

Recommending to stay updated can sound cliche and usual, but not everyone follows the rules. In fact, many fail to understand the general rule of thumb is to add regular content to their websites, and ignore that Google also notices the quality of the content updated and its regularity. This means content freshness, quality, and quantity should be considered.

In the online universe, text-only articles are outdated, whereas using multimedia power will enhance the display of your content. Text-only content can hinder your position as it becomes difficult to maintain SEO rankings even after using enough keywords. So, invest time in curating creative content for your audience. This will encourage readers and entice other websites to give a backlink to your site. This will also increase the website’s domain authority (DA).

2. Mind the Speed to Maintain SEO Rankings

Google has long before marked page speed as one of a website’s most important ranking factors. It urges webmasters to achieve their page’s loading time to less than one second on mobile devices that load faster. Because over two million blogs get posted daily, and if your webpage loads slowly, the readers might skip the page and head to another domain to read.

Remember, readers have a very short attention span and patience. So, if your website is slower than usual, the chances of losing potential consumers are higher.

page speedPage speed ensures a website is ranked at the top. One good thing is that you don’t need experts to get this right, but using some simple steps can pick the page speed. They are:

  • Switch to a more reliable and faster hosting platform to maintain SEO rankings.

  • Enable compression for all images on your website.

  • Opting on CDN is a good way to increase the download speed.

3. Link Building is the Key

According to the joint research of Aherfs and Backlinko, the first result in Google has an average of 3.8x more backlinks than positions 2-10 of the search engine result pages (SERP). So, understand the importance of link-building for a website to maintain SEO rankings.

Thus, if you are looking for organic reach, be assured of getting it through extensive link-building strategies. It includes both internal and external link-building methods. However, one mistake many marketers make is focusing on the quantity rather than the quality.

Remember, intensive link-building can be perceived as a red flag and result in the website getting banned because it has a detrimental effect on the website’s credibility and visibility in search results. At the same time, backlinking from a website with a good DA score will positively influence search engine rankings. Therefore, take it slow.

Be aware that Google is an intelligent bot that monitors the types of links you create. For example, it is not a good practice to add more links to a single article. Also, adding too many links from websites with no relevance hampers your growth in terms of ranking.

4. Building Your Social Media Presence, One App at a Time

Social media is a platform where you can find numerous potential customers, and not harnessing its power will lead to poor business visibility online. It means, that for brands, a social media presence is just as crucial as having a website to establish an identity.

social media presence Likewise, all the major social media platforms have a high page rank on search engines. So, when people come across your social media presence, they might want to explore your website, which means more viewers and conversions and easy-to-maintain SEO rankings.

Hence, directly or indirectly, social presence has a lot to push your position on a SERP.

5. Placement of Keywords

Some websites use extensive keywords. While there are no issues in using multiple keywords and keyword phrases, one major problem is the placement of the keywords, i.e., you cannot use the same five keywords in just three lines. This would otherwise be called keyword dumping.

Thus, along with understanding your content based on top-ranking keywords, Google also notices its quality. So, one of the best ways to pick keywords is to consider what customers would look up to if they knew about a brand. Here, you can also use keyword tools to find the right keywords. But remember, the trick is to place it meaningfully and correctly rather than cluttering an entire website or blog with all the keywords.

6. Aim to Reduce Your Bounce Rate

One major problem many websites face today is an increase in bounce rate. Many factors cause a high bounce rate, including poor-quality content, bad user experience, broken links, page speed, blank pages, or technical errors.

So, what can you do to avoid an increased bounce rate?

First, it is always advisable to keep an SEO checklist while doing your website audit. When the bounce rate is higher, people are unhappy. Therefore, do a quick fix by aligning content with the search intent.

Remember, if the readers have found what they are looking for, they won’t bounce. For example, a quick pop-up on a freebie or a free guide is a great way to ensure your customers stick around for a while to check out the page rather than quitting it at the beginning.

7. Ensure Your Website Is Optimized for Other Devices

Technical SEO problems are rare, and not all websites face them. However, there are three basic things to ensure the code is clean and well-organized.

Firstly, check for the website’s mobile responsiveness. It doesn’t hurt to check twice and ensure that everything is right. Technical SEO hardly lashes back, but when it does, it does with a blow.

mobile responsivenessThankfully, checking for a site’s responsive design is not so hard. All you have to do is type the website’s URL in Google’s mobile-friendly testing tool. Then, the result will appear in green text. But if something in red pops up, then there’s something wrong, and it requires a thorough checkup.

8. Indexing

Indexing organizes information in search engines before showing super-fast results for a better user experience. This process is like a chain. The search spiders first crawl to your website, following links and discovering more pages. Then, it sorts information based on the pages discovered in the previous step. Finally, it ranks the pages based on various ranking factors.

Thus, indexing helps Google bots or search bots discover your page easily and show it in its SERP.

To find out how Google indexes your page, use Google Search Console. In that, go to Index and then Coverage in the sidebar to know if there is trouble indexing your site.

9. Align Your Website to the Search Intent

Google has often been treated as a human of many types, as in, searching for answers the way questions pop up in their mind. It could be a long question, just a phrase, or even just a word at times.

So, the beauty here is that all of these are accepted and inferred by Google to show the best results for your search. But this does not happen naturally. Because, if you want your site to pop up whenever someone asks for a quick query, then you should set your website content according to the search intent.

To be precise and make things easier, search intent is of four types.

  • Informational – How many fins does a fish have? | Best tips to grow your site visibility | How can I maintain SEO rankings?

  • Navigational – Facebook | Contact ABC technologies | LinkedIn Login

  • Commercial – Best drone cameras in 2021 | Buy toe rings | House of Dragons poster

  • Transactional – Buy vegetables online | India to Dubai Flights | Health insurance quotes

So, to conclude, change the content tone or write the content as per the expectations of your customers. Remember, the foundation of any good SEO strategy is understanding WHAT readers WANT to see and giving them answers to rank organically and maintain SEO rankings.

10. Keep Tracking and Monitoring

Do not celebrate after seeing a rise in your site’s organic traffic because the work of SEO never ends. How to confirm if the rankings are doing anything for your site?

At this point, probably invest a lot of time researching, understanding, and monitoring the site’s performance to ensure the rankings stay. Track results like a pro and concentrate on improving organic CTR to ensure enough traffic to stay on top.

So, in conclusion, the work of an SEO expert begins after seeing the content or the website rank. Save yourself from any pitfalls by tracking and understanding how the rankings are performing. Because, readers always need something new, with no end to their expectations. If you learn the tips and tricks to create insanely creative content for the users, there’s no turning back.

Tips to Retain Rankings FAQs

Q1. What is backlinking, and why should I do it?

Backlinking is considered an important activity in maintaining your site’s SEO. It is telling search engines to vouch for your content. When someone is backlinking your article, they find it valuable enough to mention it to their readers. Backlinking can be done in many ways.

Backlinking is important as it helps Google discover your page and crawl it. By adding backlinks, you are directly boosting your organic search. It also helps in fast indexing and referral traffic.

Q2. What is search intent?

Search intent aligns your content with what people search for on the SERPs. It is a way of understanding the intent behind a particular query. It helps identify and categorize to show customers what they exactly want.

Understanding search intent will help you build your site’s authority by matching your content to what users are expecting. This will drive traffic and, eventually, potential leads.

Q3. Why is my website not ranking on Google?

There are many factors why your site might not be ranking on Google. Some of them can be page speed, the website’s responsive design, the quality of the content, and much more. So, do an extensive audit to ensure your website ranks and maintain SEO ranking.

Finally, an SEO checklist always helps you keep a tab on the most important SEO aspects that must be addressed regularly.