
In case you did all of the above and your question is “what happens then”, then you should know that neither on-site SEO nor off-site SEO are one-off actions.
On-site SEO should be performed regularly, not necessarily frequently. Every here and there, you should be checking your on-site SEO and maybe apply micro- optimizations.
For instance, you go back on your website and see that in your law services page, the “criminal” term is not all that much optimized, edit it and optimize it, it will be good.
Off-site SEO should, on the other hand, be performed regularly and maybe frequently.
If you can add 2-4 links per month at least, then you are getting started well. Do not add 50 links per month when your norm that far was 2-4 per month. Increase it if you can but in a subtle way. If you were adding 2-4 per month, increase it to 4-6. Off-site SEO is a process, more like a weekly habit you will need to follow. Don’t forget, there is and will be more competition on the search engines, if you stop off-site and on-site SEO, then the competition will probably overcome you and push your website lower in the search results.
Dropping and dropping
Your website was up in SERP and it looks like its dropping, what is going on? A lot of things may be going on for your website to be dropping :
- Your website is losing links from other websites, your partners are disabling links
- Competing websites are doing more SEO than you did or doing
- Your website fails to comply with new updates to the search engine’s algorithms and requirements for content e.t.c.
- Your website is hacked and is not fixed for some time
- Your website’s urls have changed and no 301 redirects have been performed thus all/some pages seem lost and the search engine is removing them from its index
- Your website is in a domain for language X but contains language Y
- Most common reasons for a website dropping in SERP is the 301 redirects and the links being lost. Keep an eye on them.
Most common reasons for a website dropping in SERP is the 301 redirects and the links being lost. Keep an eye on them. Also, make sure your website is not blocked from search engines or is not blocking itself via robots.txt.
How to keep an eye on things?
There are some very standard tools you can use to keep an eye on your website’s performance on SERPs :
- Google Webmaster Tools, its free and you will need a Google Account to access it, you will also need access to your website’s FTP or file manager ( or DNS management ) to go through the verification process.
- Bing Webmaster Tools, with an active Microsoft Account and you will also need access to your website’s FTP or file manager ( or DNS management ) to go through the verification process.
There are more tools for other search engines like Yahoo, or Yandex. Of course there are online suites that will allow you to monitor your SEO in a better way like SEMRush or MOZ.com ( and many others that I may be committing, with no agenda ).
Remember : going into i.e. Google yourself and searching to see where your website stands is not the truth, as you get personalized results, based on habits and location. This way you cannot know where your website resides in the SERP.