Your online marketing agency have performed miracles - your website has shot up to rank as number one for all your chosen keywords. So now what? Is that the end of your SEO project?

The short answer is no. It is never over. The role of your agency will change slightly now that you have reached your desired position, shifting from an aggressive ‘rankings conquering’ approach to a more defensive, consolidating strategy which maintains your position on the top spot.

Once you’ve reached your target rank, you’ll need to keep yourself there and the only sure-fire way to do this is to stay on the ball with your SEO. If you allow your SEO project to stagnate, you risk Google seeing your website as stale and irrelevant, this gives competitors the opportunity to climb up and snatch the coveted position you’ve attained through many months of hard graft.

And it isn’t just the competition that you need to worry about. Search engines are continuously updating their algorithms which calculate your rank. Nothing stays still on the internet for long, so an on-going defensive SEO strategy is essential if you want to maintain your prime position.

So once you have reached your goal rank, what’s to be done?

SEO Maintenance

First of all, your online marketing agency should now put in place an effective SEO maintenance strategy. This will include continuous link building which ensures that your website still looks relevant and up-to-date to the search engines. It will also ensure that your SEO project does not become lax and allow more aggressive competitors to outdo you.

SEO Expansion

Once you’re comfortably in your target position, you can start thinking about expanding your strategy. You might have conquered your chosen keywords but there are thousands of others out there to chase and each one could bring you a plethora of new visitors.

There are a couple of directions that your chosen online marketing agency could take your SEO expansion. You could set off on a whole new link building strategy with new sales pages for each new keyword, or you could take a more relaxed approach by setting up a regular blog which targets all the long tail keywords that could bring traffic to your site. The route you choose to go is entirely up to you, your budget, your market and your aspirations.

The most important thing to remember is that SEO is not a one-off cost. It is a continuous process which must be factored into the on-going cost of marketing your business. Failing to maintain your SEO means that all the hard work of your online marketing agency - and all the money you spent on ranking highly - will very quickly get washed away.

If you want to stay relevant and maximise your audience, Liberty Marketing can help. As Wales’ largest online marketing agency, we have experience helping clients reach, maintain and maximise their target ranking in a transparent, ethical and effective way. Get in touch today to find out more on 029 2076 6467.

As a website owner, if you are only using natural search or Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising to generate traffic to your website then you could be missing out on a significant number of visitors. The majority of search engine marketers are of the opinion that a search engine marketing campaign budget should be split between PPC advertising and a more prolonged SEO (search engine optimisation) strategy. The importance of both can be illustrated by the fact that - even with a #1 search engine ranking - up to 25% of the traffic that lands on the results page for your key terms will click on the PPC listings. On the other hand, there are plenty of online consumers who completely disregard the PPC listings, so without a natural placing on the rankings, a website only involved in PPC advertising will miss out on a vast proportion of the total market.

Of course, as always, there are exceptions to the rule. In market sectors that experience particularly high levels of competition, it may be that the CPC (cost per click) is so high that smaller operators simply cannot compete. In this case, it may be more worthwhile to spread the cost over a far longer time span by opting for an SEO strategy, which will help your site to show in the organic results over time.

In many cases, website owners will invest in a PPC advertising campaign to create a revenue stream whilst they wait for their SEO campaign to drive the site up through the rankings. The amount of time an SEO campaign will take depends on a wide number of factors, although obviously the available budget and competition already in the market will heavily influence the time span.

Before spending too much money on a PPC advertising campaign, it is important to ensure that you understand the process intimately, or hire a team of professionals who can do this for you. Without very carefully tracking PPC advertising campaigns, if you are operating in a high CPC market or competing for a high volume search phrase then you could have spent thousands before you know it - so take care!

Even with the best online marketing services to hand, rankings do have a horrible habit of fluctuating. You can spend huge amounts of money on strategy, but - if your online marketing agency isn't prepared for Google updates - it could all go out of the window very quickly indeed.

So what are Google updates and why do they cause such havoc with your place on the search engines? Above all, how can you make sure that you're investing in online marketing services that are future-proof and will withstand even the more radical change in Google's algorithm?

What are Google Updates?

In basic terms, a Google update occurs when the techie team at the search engine giant make changes to the way websites are viewed and ranked. Google uses an algorithm to work out where your website belongs in the rankings. There are hundreds of different factors, which Google's algorithm takes into consideration, some of the most crucial factors are:

• Internal links
• External links
• Anchor text
• Web copy (originality)
• Keywords
• Social metrics
• Site architecture

Agencies providing on-the-ball online marketing services will make sure that your site ticks all of the right boxes with regards to these factors. This will get your website ranking highly. Yet it isn't quite so simple because Google are constantly changing the goal posts. To paraphrase one person's remark at the recent Brighton SEO conference: "Google are the opposing team as well as the referee, plus they own the ball, the pitch and the goal posts!"

Every time Google updates their algorithm, the way they rank websites shifts. There are hundreds of updates every year and usually they are very subtle, but sometimes these updates are big news and can make a big impact. For example...

Google Panda

Many online marketing service providers will shudder at the mention of Google Panda. It was a huge update to the algorithm, which was designed to eliminate the use of unhelpful, duplicate and plagairised content and give priority to highly original, high quality websites. It hit the UK in April 2011 and dramatically impacted 11.8% of all search queries.

Many high profile websites took a real beating and many online marking agencies were left blinking in horror at the un-doing of all their hard work.

How to Get Google Update-proof

Google keep all their updates thoroughly under wraps, which means that online marketing agencies can't really do much except wait and then work with what they're given once changes hit. Even if they do hint at what changes have been made, they usually don't give too much away...

Although it's impossible to know which changes are going to happen, there are ways to help protect your website against any negative impact that updates might have. As the motivation of Google updates is to weed out low-quality, spammy webpages, an ethical online marketing strategy which places quality at the forefront of its approach is vital. If your online marketing agency or in-house team implement this sort of plan, Google is unlikely to make changes that majorly (and negatively) affect your site rankings. By creating the kind of content and links that Google likes, you're less likely to be penalised by an update.

To run a good, ethical, high-quality online marketing strategy the basics need to be covered:

• Good, unique, keyword-rich content,
• A large, varied in-bound link profile, with lots of domains, a variety of anchor text and a mixture of dofollow and nofollow links,
• A blog/news section will help keep the site seen as fresh,
• Social integration and social media work will be important in the months/years to come.

If you want to succeed online, you’ll need to work with an ethical SEO agency that provides quality-driven online marketing services. As staunchly white-hat SEO and PPC experts, Liberty Marketing can help you weather Google updates and make a big splash on the web.

Having all won tickets in a few online competitions, Steve, Ceri and Andrew from our SEO team are all at the Brighton SEO Conference today.

We haven't had any updates back in the Cardiff office today, so they are either concentrating heavily in the seminars, learning a lot of new SEO tricks, or have sloped off for some sunbathing on the beach.

Either way, if you see them this afternoon or at the after party later, say hello from the rest of us!

Digital training and consulting company, Marketing Tom Media, has invited us to help train people at the upcoming Google AdWords Workshops this month and next.

Last year, Chris and I were involved in the 2 day Google AdWords Masterclass, which got great feedback, so myself and Alun from Marketing Tom Media are doing it all over again.

Whether you are new to Pay Per Click advertising, or have some experience and want a refresher or are keen to learn the more advanced features then we'll be covering everything, from building accounts and choosing keywords to writing adverts and using ad extensions to really stand out.

The spaces have been filling fast and there are only a couple of seats remaining. You can read more and book online here.