So you’ve gone through the initial SEO improvement practices. You’ve assessed your current standing, identified keyword opportunities, optimized around your keywords and begun a link building campaign. Rather than looking at this as the end of your SEO improvement, look at it as the beginning! Now you know what’s important, how to identify opportunities, and how to act on them.
The following best practices for monitoring and continuing to improve SEO.
Set Up a Ranking Dashboard
| Keyword | Target Page | Conversion Rate | Monthly Searches | Keyword Difficulty | Ranking |
| Boston PR Agencies | YourSite.com/ | 10% | 480 | 64 | 11 (+2) |
| Public Relations Consulting | YourSite.com/consulting | 5% | 2,400 | 63 | 6 (-3) |
| Branding Service | YourSite.com/branding | 12% | 4,400 | 64 | 2 (+1) |
Keep in mind that each of these keywords will have a corresponding ‘keyword family’ that contains all the modifiers of the keyword. The search volume within this keyword family is likely many times larger than that of the keyword itself. If you want to get more granular, you can monitor keyword families instead of keywords themselves.
Experiment with Keywords
The keywords you are currently targeting may not be the best ones at drawing in traffic and converting traffic into customers. If data on search volume, difficulty or relevance tells you that another keyword would do better in any of these metrics, test it out.
Maintain On-Page Optimization
On-page optimization should be maintained alongside your keyword experiments. Additionally, you should not modify the content of any page without keywords in mind. Changing basic elements such as your page title or even on-page text can change your rankings.
Maintain a Focus on External Link Building
Regularly invest in link building, since this will help your SEO like nothing else. It also requires more long-term commitment and networking.
Continue to Look for Opportunities
By constantly working to improve your SEO, your site itself will evolve. You may need to explore new keywords or create new pages targeting different keyword families.
Courtesy of HubSpot