Sustainable SEO Practices: Strategies for Maintaining Success

Every digital marketing firm worth its salt knows that there is a remarkable difference between getting a webpage to appear on the first page of search results and ensuring that it will remain there. Any hack can stuff a webpage full of keywords or purchase backlinks from a disreputable service; it takes true knowledge and skill to build an SEO strategy that continues to deliver a high position in the SERPs.

SEO longevity requires a specific strategy that utilizes sustainable practices to keep a webpage relevant and authoritative well into the future. If you are struggling to preserve the success of your SEO efforts, here are a few must-do SEO practices to adopt today.

Quality Content

These days, creating content isn’t enough. You need to work to create high-quality content that is helpful and relevant to web users. Quality content helps a webpage thrive; web users prefer high-quality content and are more likely to consume and share pages that contain it.

How do you know that your content is high-quality? Google recommends following the E-E-A-T criteria:

• E – Experience: The content should showcase first-hand knowledge or experience rather than plagiarized or scraped information.
• E – Expertise: The content should exhibit depth of topic, going beyond basic facts or common sense to deliver unique value.
• A – Authoritativeness: The content should come from the proper authority. For example, a TikTok influencer should not be writing content for the CDC.
• T – Trustworthiness: The content should demonstrate integrity through its use of facts, its ad placement, its security, and more.

If you don’t have any solid writers within your marketing staff, you might consider hiring one or partnering with an experienced freelancer. As tempting as it might be to use generative AI platforms like Chat GPT, these tools will always fail the E-E-A-T test, and more likely than not, search engines will develop methods for identifying and de-indexing AI-generated content in the future. Sustainable SEO is not about quick fixes like AI; it is about investing in superior strategies that will stand the test of time.

Once you have a system for generating quality content, you should develop a consistent schedule for publishing content on your client’s site. You might also start developing content that can serve as guest posts on other authoritative pages around the web. High-quality guest posts will continue to provide valuable backlinks into the future.

Website Optimization

Unfortunately, quality content alone doesn’t do much to improve a website’s long-term search ranking. Web users and search engines need to be able to access that content easily. In fact, it is important that the entire website is accessible, that moving from page to page around the domain is simple and perhaps enjoyable.

Optimizing a website requires knowing more about how users interact with a specific site. Still, there are a few essential ways you must optimize your client’s website to ensure SEO sustainability. Hey include:

• Speed. Web pages need to load quickly. Most web users will only wait a few seconds for a page to load before losing interest and bouncing.
• Mobile. Most users are navigating the internet on mobile devices. Ideally, all web pages will be dynamic, which means their design will automatically shift to suit the size of a user’s screen.
• Navigation. Users should know exactly which links to use to reach different content on a website. Additionally, internal links should be kept up throughout website updates.
• Accessibility. A range of disabilities can make using the web difficult. You need to make accommodations for users with disabilities, so assistive technologies work well across a website.

Often, SEO strategies involve overhauling a client’s website at the start, but for the sake of longevity, you must return to their site again and again to ensure that these elements remain properly optimized.

Team Training

Search algorithms constantly change as search engines develop new techniques for delivering quality information to web users. Consider all the changes to Google’s SERP in recent years: rich snippets, AI overviews, and more. As search algorithms change, so do SEO strategies. Thus, perhaps the most important practice for ensuring sustainable SEO is keeping your SEO team’s skills up to date.

You should give your SEO team plenty of opportunities to continue their education and gain cutting-edge techniques. You might provide unlimited access to online classes in fields like HTML. You might help employees cross-train by partnering them across departments. You might provide them with top-tier marketing tools, which will help them learn to assess new web metrics.

Because SEO strategies are constantly shifting, SEO team training is not something you can easily ignore. By investing in employee education, you will future-proof not only your client’s position on the results page but also your own firm’s long-term success.

True SEO is never one-and-done. You will need to put in a continuous effort to ensure a web page stays high up on the SERP. Even so, by investing in sustainable practices like those above, you can reduce your workload and see greater longevity in your results.