In the search engine results pages (SERPS), your position is always relative to the position of the other sites in the same results. Until your site is ranked #1 there are always a number of sites that are naturally ranked better than yours, or are working harder to keep their position higher in the SERPS than yours. At the same time, there are also many sites ranked farther down than yours that are striving to rank up above where your site is. For this reason, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Internet Marketing are not a "one-time fix", rather they are ongoing processes to continually improve the visibility of your website in the search engines and market your site in many different ways on the Internet.
Most small and medium sized busnesses do not have the resources to hire on to their staff a team of full time professionals to handle the ongoing marketing and SEO services for their business website. For these companies, an attractive alternative is to contract another company to handle this aspect of their marketing program so they can relax knowing that experienced professionals are working to promote their website in as many ways as possible.
Where many companies fall down here is thinking that that after three or six months enough progress has been made to justify dropping their SEO and Internet Marketing campaign. Others may also feel that the progress does not seem to be happening as fast as they had expected. What both fail to realize is that they are dropping the all when it has just started rolling, and that ball can very soon stop rolling again. This is the case for not only smaller business sites, but also the very large sites with many pages.
Smaller sites generally are those starting with very little content with which to establish authority on a subject or a regional presence in the local SERPS. They require time spent on content building on a monthly basis to develop and maintain a much stronger presence on the web. The very large sites face a different problem, in that they require much initial time and effort to go through them page by page to get the on-page work done before efforts can be focused in other areas.
No matter what size your website or company is, SEO and Internet Marketing must be performed on an ongoing basis in order to achieve the best results. Every month there will be more competitors seeking to move in on your position and bump you down, and it is up to you and your SEO team to raise the bar on your competitors and maximize your rank and visibility in the search engines, and continually increase the flow of valuable customers through your doors.
