Long-term SEO Strategy

Long-term SEO Strategy

Before we dive into daily and weekly SEO tasks to work on, we should stress the importance of having a long-term SEO strategy. While it’s good to have a list of quick SEO tasks, make sure you keep an eye on the bigger picture. You should base your strategy on extensive keyword research, look at search intent, set goals and analyze how your site is doing.

On days you only have about an hour to spend on your site, consider tackling one of the following tasks.

1. Fresh your content

Content is important to rank, which is why you should aim to regularly add new content and keep existing content up to date. Either writing and publishing new content or updating existing content is something that should be part of everyday website optimization. You don’t have to publish a new post every day, just try to stick to a schedule of publishing that’s realistic for you. If you publish a (new) post every Wednesday, for example, your audience will, in time, know to look forward to that! 

Odds are, you also have lots of valuable articles laying around that only need a small update before they can be published again. If you don’t have time to write a new article, it’s useful to have a list of posts like this and work on one of those as your daily SEO task.

A task that’s also related to keeping your content fresh and alive: if you get a lot of comments on your blog posts, try to regularly interact with commenters. If you don’t reply to their comments, people can feel ignored, and it doesn’t look good to have a load of unanswered comments on your content pages either. 

2. Your internal linking structure

Working on a good internal linking structure is like rolling out the red carpet for Google. But as your site keeps growing, you should also continue improving that internal linking structure.  

One of the things to keep an eye out for every time you look at your post overview is orphaned content. It’s such a waste having content that doesn’t get any text links from your other posts or pages, as those contextual links add much value. Have a hard time finding orphaned content? The Yoast plugin is here to help! After installing it, there’s no need to open every post to see which internal links you’ve added already: simply use the filter in the post overview to locate orphaned content and add relevant links!

Another thing to incorporate into your daily SEO efforts: linking to your cornerstone content. Ideally, you should add links to relevant cornerstone content when you’re updating or publishing articles. But, just to make sure you haven’t forgotten any cornerstones, check your most recent posts and make sure they include links to relevant cornerstones. 

Haven’t you thought about a cornerstone content strategy yet? Now is the time to start working on that! Yoast SEO can help you set up a kickass cornerstone strategy.

3. Keep your site maintenance on track

Most of you will agree that it’s better to do a bit of cleaning every day, rather than waiting for the house to become a huge, dirty mess. It’s the same for your website: don’t wait until the number of pages has become unmanageable, stay on top of things!

One way to do that as part of your everyday SEO is to look out for cannibalized content. Since you’re already making sure you regularly publish or republish content, it’s only a little bit of extra effort to ensure you’re not competing with (other) existing content on your site. If you come across two articles that are on a similar topic, from a similar point of view, consider combining them into one new article. Unfortunately, too much of a good thing, such as quality content, can still cause problems. So take some time to ensure your content isn’t repeating itself!

Similarly, don’t keep unnecessary pages around. Regularly factor in some time to check for pages that have lost their relevance and can’t be updated. Delete these pages (properly) from your site and you’ll thank yourself later! Yoast SEO Premium makes deleting and redirecting pages super easy, so check it out if you want to save even more time!

4. Work on any technical SEO

Many technical SEO tasks require time and expertise, or don’t need to be part of your daily routine. Nevertheless, there are things you should pay attention to on a regular basis.

One of them is keeping the size of your images as small as possible. Having high-quality images on your site is a must, but you don’t want your handpicked picture to slow down your site! A quick task to add to your SEO routine: use tools like ImageOptim or websites like JPEGmini, jpeg.io or Kraken.io to optimize the size of your images.

5. Uses of social media

You’re probably active on one or more social media platforms. Regularly posting updates for your followers is a good idea, to make clear that your account is alive and kicking. You can share your blog posts, but also pictures you take, events from your daily life, other articles you find interesting, and so on… You know your audience best, you know what they’ll like. And, while you’re at it, also try to regularly interact with people leaving comments on your social media pages, so you keep them engaged.

Conclusion on everyday SEO

That’s it! Work on one of these six things once a day, and you’re well on your way to keeping your site’s SEO in good shape. And don’t forget to invest some more time into your long term SEO strategy whenever you can, for a truly sustainable approach to SEO!