It’s easy to understand why many people want search engine optimization to be something you do once and then you’re done. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple—especially not when there is competition.
It can sometimes seem as if SEO is something you can implement and then forget about. If you change all the titles in your e-commerce site so they include keywords, category names on category pages, and product names on product pages, you will get a boost. You will climb in the rankings for those keywords. Many of the changes made during SEO work can appear to have this kind of effect—but there is a major flaw in that line of thinking.
Sure, if you are the first in your segment to include the keyword in the title, you might very well reach a top position (often it takes much more than that, but we simplify here to make the point clear). If in 1999 you made sure to include keywords in the titles on every page, you could, with this mindset, just sit back and let the money roll in. The problem, of course, is that someone else figured out the same thing in 2004.
If your advantage over your competitors is nothing more than a 59-character text snippet, you can expect that sooner rather than later someone hungrier than you will come along and overtake you. SEO is something you need to work on long term. It takes time, and it will involve a fair amount of pain the day you can no longer live off the authority you’ve already built. Sure, it’s possible to gain a lot of authority by chance, and yes, your site may be perfectly built—but as long as you have competitors, they will fight to pass you and leave you behind.
It is extremely clear to us that the moment you stop working on your SEO, you begin to slowly but surely lose positions. And that’s without even factoring in the fact that Google tends to change the rules all the time. It’s a bit like exercise—you won’t get very far by saying, “Well, I worked out once.”
