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A famous quote goes ~ “Freedom is harder to defend than achieving.” The same thing goes here too. Ranking to the top is hard, but maintaining that position is harder. Search on Google or YouTube about SEO. You’ll find millions of tips to rank higher or build more traffic to your website. Even at Star-media, we’ve written enough articles related to digital marketing, starting from the basics of SEO to web design tips or PPC strategies.

But everyone isn’t teaching you to maintain that traffic after your reach the top or go viral someday. If you think you don’t need to maintain your SEO rankings after you’ve ranked at the top for your targeted keywords, you’re wrong. Once you’ve reached the top, it doesn’t mean you’ll stay there forever. Your competitors can climb over you just as easily as you’ve climbed over them.

Ranking in Google’s first SERP, in the top ten search results for a targeted keyword, is probably every small website owner’s dream. Getting there is definitely not easy when you are a newbie in the market.

It requires consistency – which will cost you a large amount of time, genuine knowledge & tricks, great effort and a bulky budget. But keeping your position at the top is harder than that.

So, what are the tactics you need to apply so your rankings stay safe even after you’ve reached the top? You should follow certain things, and we’ll teach you how to do it.

Why You Shouldn’t Stop Focusing on SEO

SEO is probably the most significant part of your digital marketing strategy that needs ongoing maintenance. Your rankings can easily slip away at any moment if you take a break for a long time from your SEO campaign after achieving your goals.

Just as you once worked hard to beat your competitors to rank for your targeted keywords, others will try to outrank you once you reach the top.

Think about it, a website that used to get thousands of visitors every day falls to 50 or 60 visitors a day. It’ll happen when some of your competitors climb over you. Most of the people click on the first result of Google, and as you’ve lost that position, your traffic will also fall from the hill.

maintain seo rankings

To keep your website enough competitive and prevent loss of regular traffic, you need to ensure you don’t lose your SEO rankings. Besides, the more time you spend at the top of the search results, you will gain more credibility. 

Holding the position longer will increase your branding value, making your website an authority in people’s minds. It means people will mark you as a reliable source of information and this can result in more backlinks which also means more & more traffic.

Stay Up-to-date about Google’s Algorithm Change

Most experts estimate that Google changes its search algorithm around 500 to 600 times every year. That’s like they are tweaking it once or twice each day. While most of these changes don’t crucially change the SEO landscape, some updates are important and may change the way we go about writing for SEO.

It means you need to be ready to change and adjust your SEO tactics because Google’s algorithms are constantly changing and the tactics that worked before may not work in the future. 

A decade before, people used to say the title needs to be very long so that grow more attraction on people’s minds to click the link. But now we know, a title needs to be written in a specific range, so the last part doesn’t get removed in Google SERPs.

That is why you always need to stay up-to-date with the latest changes in ranking factors. Obviously, Google doesn’t reveal all of their algorithm secrets (and never will), you can still research & learn about those important tweaks from Google Search Central Blog, or some other famous blogs such as SEMrush blog, Backlinko, etc. 

You’re keeping the knowledge of algorithm tweaks in your brain? Great! It’s just the start. Continue reading to find out what else you need to do to keep your SEO rankings safe.

Enhance User Experience

User satisfaction is one of the top-ranking factors. That is why providing a flawless user experience should be your top priority.

enhance user experience
Image Credit: Net Solutions

Page Speed

One of the most important things to focus on here is the loading speed of your web pages. This is also counted as a very important ranking factor.

Not only is a slow-loading website bad for search rankings, but it’s also bad for you and your visitors. If you have delays in your website speed your visitors won’t be happy. An ideal website load time is 2 to 5 seconds. However, each second beyond 2 seconds results in greater bounce rates. In fact, 40% of polled internet users report abandoning a site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. That’s how you could lose potential customers. This is why it is very important to ensure your website loads without any delays. For that, you need a regular check of your site’s speed.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights is a great tool for checking the speed of your website on both desktop and mobile devices. It will give you an insight into how well your website performs, what are the issues, and even how to fix those.

Meta Tags

Another thing you should pay attention to is optimizing meta tags. If your meta tags aren’t optimized, you risk having a high rate of pogo-sticking. The term pogo-sticking means when a user performs a search, clicks on a result, but very quickly clicks back to the search result page, and clicks on a different result. This happens because your visitors become unsatisfied immediately with what they see on your page.

One reason for this is because of your clickbait title. Don’t use irrelevant meta titles for your content. you should do your best to ensure visitors find what they’re looking for on your page.

Keep your title up to 65 characters long, make them relevant and attractive. Your meta tags should be specific, and short but descriptive. If it’s longer than 65 characters, it will not show completely which lures visitors to confusion. [an example below]

maintain search engine optimisation

Consistency

The single word suggestion is consistency. Keep in mind that if you don’t publish content on a regular basis, you’ll experience a drop in your traffic graph. Don’t hope for a return from your visitors at the beginning. You know, Karma is a thing, and you’ll surely get your return if you care for your audience. Continuing to provide value to your audience will help you stay on top and establish yourself as a reliable authority. This is why you should continue with your content marketing strategy even after you reach your initial goals.

You can take Neil Patel as an example; he’s continuously sharing his knowledge in his blog. Or check out his YouTube channel, he’s uploading 3 videos per week. The result? You may know that he’s the 2nd in the top 10 list of digital marketers around the world, certified by Forbes.

Unique Content

To stay competitive, it is wise to step up your efforts. Think outside the market and offer your customers unique content they can’t find anywhere else. Put some effort into research and create an extensive list of resources or unique statistics. 

While staying at the top, you can experiment with producing various types of content. Start creating infographics, videos. The best one will be writing long-form content which usually ranks better in search results because Google also wanna show its users the most useful and detailed content. You may find one content strategy good, but don’t start publishing the same type of content constantly.

Infographics

Infographics are also cool and easy to consume. If you want the best designs for your website, you can take a look at our service page. But yeah, don’t put them too much inside your content, you risk boring your visitors.

Hyperlinks

Include useful hyperlinks in your content. Linking to other content within your articles will decrease your bounce rate and enhance the crawlability of your site.

Including internal and external links to relevant content will help your readers find additional relevant information. Especially, those internal links will give you an extra SEO boost. You should insert one external link against three internal links.

Traffic from Inbound Links

Your site is fully optimized? Great! Now you should spend time getting referral traffic. There are tons of ways to build backlinks. The best way is to contribute guest posts on other sites. 

Some specific sites are only designed for guest posting. You can post one content to all of them easily including your link with the article.

In addition to that, you can find some suitable websites that are familiar with your website’s topic. Knock the website owners, and build a professional relationship. You can start this relationship directly by reaching them by email, or you can start by commenting on one of their blog posts, or after giving them a shoutout backlink. Spend a month just by improving conversation. After you have a professional relationship with them, you can request a guest post or a link in their posts as an external resource page.

These inbound links from other websites will enhance your brand awareness that results in more relevant traffic from other website visitors.

Stay Ahead of Your Competitors

You always need to keep an eye on your competitors. To grab the audience from the search result page, you need to make sure it’s better than your competitors.

Spying on them can be divided into two parts. First of all, look at what they’re producing. Always be one step ahead of your competitors and make sure your content isn’t outdated. 

Secondly, check out their marketing activities. Use tools like Ubersuggest, or SEMrush, and continuously check their rankings. Find their SEO issues, analyse what tactic they’re missing, and apply that on your website. 

Moreover, you can find which websites are giving them a link. Reach those website owners to build relationships, then offer your content and request to replace backlinks to beat your competitors.

Become an Authority

Give some effort to social media. Regularly sharing about yourself and your content will give it more exposure in audiences’ eyes and drive traffic to your website. These social shares naturally help your search rankings.

  • However, you can apply one more trick. Spy on your competitors and find which people are sharing your competitor’s content. Reach them, show your content, and request to share your one also in their personal social media account. It’ll help you to establish yourself as an authority across all social media platforms.

Also, add some social share icons that are visible along all of your content. People always don’t remember actually, but when they see those icons, they may share your content. There are some easy-to-use WordPress plugins that you can use.

Whenever you publish content or write a guest post, make sure you add your social media link to your author bio. I hope your contents are good, and if people like it, there’s a chance that they’d like to follow you on social media too.

You can easily get new followers on social media in this way. The more followers you have, the more shares you’ll get. And obviously, it’ll generate more traffic to your website. 

Here at Star-media, we know exactly how to help you reach your audience, grow engagements, and promote your brand. Check out our service page if you want the best social media management service.

Conclusion

SEO is a strategy that never ends, even after you complete all your goals. As Google is changing its algorithm continuously, you also need to be updated. And the upcoming world of web 3.0 is gonna be harder as your competitors are increasing day by day.

So, maintain content marketing, monitor your competition and build yourself as an authority. Work hard and you’ll be able to keep your crown on top of the head permanently.