A lot of SEO advice concentrates on what you should do when you first SEO your site. This is great for businesses that are just approaching search engine optimisation, as it gives them a fair idea of what to expect and look out for. However, what happens after that initial stage?

It’s not often talked about, but it can be necessary to change tactics with SEO after the first few weeks. This can seem like an odd idea. After all, you’ve just invested time and money on a particular strategy. It would be strange to suddenly change your mind, wouldn’t it? In fact, changing your mind is a big part of how SEO works best in the long term.

It’s fairly well known within the SEO community that good search engine optimisation requires maintenance. It doesn’t have to be particularly frequent, or particularly intensive, depending on the size of your site. Regular analysis and little touches here and there are necessary to keep any business on the right track, and it’s no different when it comes to the web. What are less often talked about are the immediate touch-ups required to an SEO plan in the first few weeks.

For example, your home page might be optimised for two main keywords. In the first few weeks of implementation, you are likely to discover that one keyword is achieving more than the other. If the gap in performance is small or expected, this is fine. If the gap is large, or an unexpected keyword has risen to the top, you will need to re-examine your tactics. In cases where the keywords are similar, for example ‘television repairs’ and ‘television repair services’, one can simply take precedence. If the keywords have different targets, such as ‘television repairs’ and ‘television buy’, then the SEO strategy for that page may need to be rethought.

In analysing the first period of data for your site after SEO, there are things you need to consider. The results of your analysis will tell you some things, but it won’t tell you what to do. For example, a page might be ranking lower than expected but your traffic and conversions coming from that page might be higher than hoped. Do you interfere with what on one hand is a disappointing result at the expense of what on the other hand is business success? What you do will depend on the precise situation.

It’s important to remember that search engine optimisation is an ongoing process. In the case above, the best path to take might be to wait. Results from the first weeks after optimisation take some time to settle down so that they can be analysed in a way that is relevant to your business.

Your SEO consultant can provide valuable guidance through this initial analytical period, and it can be helpful to keep them on board for future maintenance of your site’s SEO. You can talk with us at SEO Consult about ongoing optimisation and what that means in practice for your business.

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