Most business owners now understand the importance of SEO. However, for your website to maintain that number one spot in page rankings, you need regular maintenance of your site. Let’s look into why website maintenance keeps your strategy functioning at peak performance.

Newer Content Improves Rankings

Part of website maintenance is ensuring that your site always has fresh content. This activity helps search engines to realize that the site is alive, which helps your page rankings. Most search engines, including Google, will check your website pages’ “if-modified-since” HTTP header. This will help them determine whether they must crawl your site or not. If your site is not regularly crawled, this creates room for competitors to get ahead of you. With time, you will end up being pushed below active competitors in the listings, and this will cost you a lot of website visitors and business.

Website Maintenance Improves Site Speed

It is a well-known fact that site speed contributes to page rankings. In fact, if your website loads slowly, chances are you will never make that number one spot. This is especially true if your website loads slowly on mobile. You must always keep in mind that there are more than two million blog posts published daily. This means that if your website is not loading fast enough, your visitors will just find the next source of information. It’s important to ask your web designers to ensure that your page load times are down to less than a second for mobile devices. It’s also important to understand that this doesn’t happen instantly. So, to ensure that you get as close to this goal as possible, you must keep up with website maintenance so you can shave off seconds from your loading times consistently.

Link Building as Part of Website Maintenance

As you are maintaining your website, you must not neglect link building. This is a very important task that will help you build links gradually and get better page rankings. To maintain and improve your ranking, you must expand inbound links and spread them over various pages on your website. This will help diversify your backlink profile and improve your SEO rankings in the process.

These are some of the reasons why website maintenance is important for SEO. Unfortunately, only 11% of web designers say their clients can update their own websites once launched. If you aren’t able to update your own website, you should hire a developer to do it for you.