[inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=”@StoneyD”]There is no such thing as one time SEO. [/inlinetweet]You see this a lot when SEO is offered as part of a new website design. The developers want to provide a value-add service and include “optimization” as part of the package. Unfortunately, this often creates false expectations.
There is a lot about SEO that is a one-time fix, but as a whole, optimization is never done. As a web marketing company, we are always analyzing data to find weak spots in the site architecture and site performance. As we find these problems, we then invest time in fixing them.
Once fixed, for the most part, the issue is dead. We write new title tags: fixed. Correct broken links: fixed. Improve the navigation: fixed. Optimize content: fixed.
But that’s not the end of good SEO. Fixing one problem often allows another problem to reveal itself. This is why we do regular broken link checks. Fixing hundreds or thousands of links on a site is great, but sometimes those broken links are masking other, even more critical issues. But you won’t know about them until the broken links are fixed first.
There is also the issue of optimizing for keywords. In almost 20 years of doing SEO, I have only been in the position once or twice where we have literally run out of keywords to optimize for. That only happens in very niche industries where searches are limited.
Most sites, however, have thousands upon thousands of keyword optimization opportunities. And even if you can optimize 10-20 keywords for a page, that’s still a lot of pages and blog posts that can be written and/or optimized. A seemingly endless opportunity for bringing in traffic from new sources!
So yes, there is a “one and done” aspect to SEO, but just beware if that’s what you’re buying. That’s part of SEO, but certainly nothing close to a complete web marketing package. Every web developer should include the one-and-done aspects of SEO into their site development, but if you truly want web marketing that will work, you need to move from one and done to “ever-expanding opportunities.”