This is a question that faces a lot of business owners and SEO companies/consultants. Surely you understand that if you just did a lot of work to rank, your competitors could be busy at work as well, trying to bump you down or gain rank for themselves. So what do you do?
Consultants question whether they can charge for SEO services, retainers, or monthly fees if the client already is ranking. My answer, is yes. If you’re a business owner wanting to know if you should stop paying for SEO once you’re already ranking, my answer is no.
When do you stop? When it stops being profitable.
However, that isn’t the purpose here today, the purpose is to discuss SEO after you’re already ranking.
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Competition Analysis For SEO
One thing you need to continue doing whether you’re ranking in the A spot in local or ranking #1 overall in organic is to continue performing competitor analysis.
If you’re #1 you want to stay #1. If you knocked someone down, you can pretty much bet on the fact that they’re going to do some digging and try to figure out what you did to gain the top spot.
On a monthly basis, you should be performing competition analysis to see the following:
- Are they publishing new content?
- Are they building backlinks?
- Are they building backlinks that you don’t have, and can also grab?
- Are they generating additional reviews?
- Are they building more citations?
Analyzing the competition is typically at the beginning of the work cycle for most people doing SEO. For those that are smart, and continue to keep their rankings, they are actively analyzing what the competitors are doing to make sure they don’t lose any ground or search market share.
Continue Building Citations
Another thing you should be doing once you’re already ranking, and this is definitely more important for local businesses or SEOs that are working with local businesses. You need to continue building citations, the more citations a business has, the more relevance they carry as being “established” in the eyes of Google.
Even if you already have claimed the top 50 citations for the client or your own business, there are many more out there than just 50. Once you have a few hundred citations and you think there can’t possibly be any additional sources or directories you can get into… it’s time to create your own citation sources.
Creating your own citation source doesn’t mean creating your own directory, it means utilizing other properties to create what is technically called an “unstructured citation”.
These unstructured citations can be in the form of:
- Guest Blog Post
- Article Directory Author line
- Press Releases
- Youtube Video and other Video Directory submissions (use NAP in description)
- Social Media Profiles
- Even Blog comments and Forum posts
For more information on building citations, check out this free ULTIMATE Guide For Building Citations.
Continue Building Backlinks
We all know the rave behind backlinks, everybody talks about backlink this backlink that, yada yada. For local SEO backlinks aren’t the most important aspect, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t important at all.
The good news is, that if you’re building backlinks for Local SEO purposes, then you’ve already done a lot of that when building your citations. Citations usually allow for a URL, and I hope you would fill that out with your website to gain the free backlink!
As for the sources, don’t overthink it. A good backlink in my opinion is not determined by what the PR or domain authority is, I think of a good backlink being one that has the potential to bring me quality traffic. I don’t really think of anything else.
Approach backlinking in a way that you would market your business. A smart marketing wouldn’t just spray and pray that the audience will find the message they send out… a smart marketer would strategically position themselves to have an advantage. The same thing is true with backlinking.
You Can NEVER Have Too Many Reviews
It doesn’t matter whether you’re ranking #1 or nowhere, you can never have too many reviews. Reviews give a lot of weight to your local rankings but even in organic search for national keywords, reviews are very important. Whether it is a product review, or service review, you will want to continue hustling for reviews.
Don’t buy the fake testimonial videos on fiverr, they aren’t going to legitimately help you, in fact, they could likely hurt you if someone finds out. After all, it is against the law.
Implement a small scaled review harvesting campaign for your client or yourself, this will help you with branding, reputation, as well as rankings.
Take Up Additional Search Real Estate
Just because you’re ranking well in search, doesn’t mean the job is over. You should be getting greedy, and want to take up additional spots in the SERPs.
One of my favorite ways of doing this is by creating a lot of different city specific, optimized videos for a variety of keywords, upload them to youtube with a fully optimized file name, title, description and tags. You can also build backlinks (even less high quality backlinks) to those videos.
You can create basic slideshow videos with music by using animoto, it’s cheap and easy.
What do you do when you rank a website? Continue working on it or is your work finished? Let me know in the comments below!
Excellent article on ongoing seo for local businesses
Thanks Nathan.
Thank you Thomas 🙂
Nathan,
Nice post, almost a presentation in of itself for selling/convincing clients to keep using our SEO services. Make this into a nice prezi and it’s gold.
I have found Rand did a good presentation on selling SEO over PPC a couple of weeks ago, another presentation in the rough!
Thanks for this, very rarely will I see a SEO expert talk about sales cycle processes AFTER the initial sale. This would be a natural extension of our client onboarding process featured in Grade.us blog this month, when we talk about the monthly follow-up call and by adding value.
blog.grade.us/onboard-clients-review-management-marketing/
By the way Nathan, your blog is probably the most well rounded SALES wise that I read for SEO and digital marketing. Again, how you covered this part of the sales cycle in this article, you generally like to cover the sales cycle instead of discussing SEO itself (which you still do).
SEO guys aren’t necessarily known to be the sales ‘rainmakers’ by nature so it’s refreshing when you get to read about that aspect.
Hey Justin, thanks for coming by and leaving a comment. It’s definitely something that isn’t talked about very often, but very important. We always have to prove value to our clients, and it doesn’t matter how good you are at SEO and what results you can bring if you aren’t constantly trying to improve sales skills!