When business owners start marketing online, what’s one of the first things they check to see if everything’s working? They do a search on Google for their business. Chances are, if the site isn’t on the first page, business owners might panic. We understand! How can you know if it’s working, or if you’re getting your money’s worth?

What most people don’t like to hear is that strategic, quality SEO work takes time. But the gains are solid and near impossible to beat if maintained. Any SEO expert worth your time and money will tell you this.

That being said, if you want your site to rise to that #1 spot faster, you can help out your SEO by making sure your website is up to date, and that you regularly include new content in the form of pages or blog posts.

How to Keep Your Site Content Up to Date:

• Make sure your address, hours and contact information are correct. This is simple, but hugely important for SEO.

• Add new stuff. If your shop has started offering a new service, add it to your services page but make sure you create a new page to talk about the details of the service for customers who want to learn more. You can do this by adding a page straight to the main website, or include it in a blog post, both are searchable and good options.

• Blog, blog, blog! We could talk ourselves hoarse over here at CarCareCONNECT, just talking about the benefits of blogging. Blogging is an extremely powerful SEO tool- the results are obvious and immediate, and anybody can do it with a little practice. Write blogs about the importance of auto care and maintenance for your customers, write about the industry, write about what’s going on at the shop, write about an interesting repair job you had recently, the list goes on and on. More blog tips here.

Do you have a Google+ or Google Places page? You should! And if you do, you should check in on your page about as much as you do on your website. Make sure the information on your page is up to date as well, just like on your website. Because Google checks both of these, if the information on your website and Google+ page don’t match, it can decrease your rank and cause Google to hide your Google+ page for a while- at least until the conflicting information is straightened out.

• Don’t overdo it! Even though it’s great to add new content to your site, doing so too often can have the opposite effect you want. Make sure that the core of your website, the Home page, About page, Services pages, Contact page etc. stay pretty much the same. The really important SEO information is on these pages, and changing them often will mean that Google has to reconsider them essentially, and cause you to lose rank.

• Make it a habit. Business owners aren’t as proactive in their web marketing as they need to be. Most of the time it’s because they’re busy running a business, but what most don’t realize is that this step doesn’t have to take up a lot of time at all. If you check e-mail everyday, you can make sure that one day a week, you’re also checking in on your website. Set an automatic reminder for yourself to visit your website on a weekly basis and make sure everything’s correct and looking good. Your web company usually works on the back end of things and might not be able to tell if a certain detail about your service or information has gone missing or is incorrect.

CarCareCONNECT works hard to make sure our customers’ websites are technically sound and in compliance with the latest Google updates. Search Engine Optimization is as much of an art as it is a science because it changes so quickly. Technology is developing at blinding speed, so the big web companies, like Google, are constantly rolling out new features to improve service- and to “wow” consumers. This means SEO Experts are constantly learning new ways to get their websites ranked higher.

It’s best to leave the really technical aspects of SEO to your SEO expert. Google and the major search engines make SEO hard for a reason- they want to make it difficult but fair, so the best websites that put in the hard work can rise to the top.