What is Search Engine Optimization?

Many small business owners are surprised when they find out that SEO is not a one-time deal. They didn’t realize that they have to pay monthly for it.

Here are the main reasons why this is so:

• The first thing you need to realize is that SEO is a campaign . You just don’t tweak something in your website and Kaboom! —your website shoots straight to the top for the most popular keywords in your niche. It doesn’t work that way.
• The first few days of working with an SEO firm will consist of discussions and research, to determine what your goals are and what the best methods are to achieve those goals. The firm will “diagnose” your website and numerous improvements are made on it so that it complies with Google’s requirements. The check-up alone can take a lot of time.
• Then research is made to determine which keywords to aim for. Some keywords you think are relevant may not actually be used by your potential customers. Other keywords may be targeted by large multinational companies with millions of dollars being spent on marketing. What you and your SEO provider will need to find are the keywords which your potential customers are using but are not being heavily targeted by your competitors.
• After that, the SEO professional will analyze your competitor (especially those who are in the top spots in Google) to see what they’re doing right and to find the backlinks they’re using. The most valuable backlinks must be identified, and then efforts must be made to get those backlinks for your website as well.
• Then they will begin the link building process. Now this phase will take a lot of time and that’s because Google will penalize you when you suddenly have a thousand backlinks sprouting overnight. To make it appear natural, this process takes months and yes, it will be a continuous process for as long as you want your website to be optimized for search engine ranking.

You don’t just stop and say that you’ve got enough backlinks and you don’t need any more. That’s like stopping or slowing down when you’re in a race. Your competitors are all trying to rank too, and pretty soon you’ll get overtaken if you don’t keep up your pace.

• Then you’ll also need to feature new content on your website on a regular basis. The highest ranking websites tend to have fresh content nearly every day. Since you may not be able to do this yourself, you’ll then have to rely on your SEO provider for this particular task. They will also make sure that the content published on your site is properly optimized as well.

And since this service is also recurring, it will be added to your monthly bill.

• The SEO firm also does monthly checks on your site. For example, it constantly checks to see that your site is always up, that your security is adequate against hacking, and that the loading speed for your web pages is fast. These things are crucial not just for SEO, but for your website visitors (customers) as well.

So even when your website has reached the top spot for your keywords, you still need SEO to remain in that position. And that’s essentially why you need to pay monthly for SEO.