How often should I do SEO?

The reason comes down to how rankings actually work. Your position isn’t fixed – it’s relative to everyone else targeting the same searches. Stopping doesn’t mean your rankings freeze in place. It means everyone still working slowly moves past you.

In practice, a sensible rhythm for a small business looks like monthly activity rather than a burst of work followed by nothing. That usually means new pages targeting real questions, refinements to existing pages that are close to ranking but not quite there, and keeping an eye on what’s actually moving.

There’s a genuine exception worth naming. A site with solid foundations and content already covering its main services can sometimes coast for a few months without much falling over, particularly in a less competitive local market. That’s a pause, not a strategy, and it works better as a deliberate decision than as a plan that quietly stopped.

The other honest point: SEO doesn’t need to be constant to work, but it does need to be consistent. Two focused days a month, done reliably, produces considerably more than a frantic fortnight followed by six months of silence – the kind of pattern that shows up clearly in businesses with predictable seasonal demand, such as accountants around EOFY or roofers after major storms. That’s also why it takes months rather than weeks to see results: the compounding only happens if the work keeps happening.

If you’re deciding whether to commit, the useful question isn’t how often SEO needs doing. It’s whether you can sustain a modest amount of work every month for a year, because that’s what produces the result, not intensity in any single month.

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