Well, never really. One of the challenges faced by many organizations is that they only implement SEO by campaign, say for a particular microsite or just to get rankings up under key terms and keywords. Then they take a look at all the time and money they’ve spent and may think a) we’re done now and b) we can’t keep spending like this. Well, sort of. The key is to look at SEO as part of a whole in your marketing efforts and how it relates not just to marketing the site, but the tie-ins to the other parts of your company. There are some other key considerations and it all has to do with planning.
At the outset, you should be thinking about optimizing for the “organizational whole”, which means you want rankings not just on key marketing oriented terms, but to attract potential employees and investors. Some companies, in fact many we’ve seen, tend to think strictly marketing. But truly marketing means marketing the whole company. So it’s good to optimize the content on the whole site (for some a massive undertaking for sure) and to think in strategic terms. Prepare for product updates and changes in the market. Put the processes in place so that your SEO work becomes as routine as the marketing calendar and budget planning process.
Secondly, make the time to ensure you have available resources to tweak your SEO work over time. Once a good foundation is laid and you have some in-house expertise, you shouldn’t have to fork out major budget allocations to SEO work from an outside agency.
If you don’t maintain your efforts, chances are your position in the search engines will decline. This is natural as much of SEO is really organic. If you’re regularly updating content and managing your site, focused on your customers and various audiences first, your rankings should stay quite steady.
So the key is to effectively plan for the Post-SEO work, making it part of your routine marketing processes and an element in your Marketing Calendar. Good ongoing SEO is just part of your marketing best practices.