Ongoing SEO, often sold as monthly SEO, is optimisation work done at a fixed rhythm, usually for a monthly fee, on a site that has already been set up. Its opposite is one-off SEO, a closed piece of work: an audit, a migration, a technical clean-up delivered and invoiced once.
We read the top results on Google UK for "ongoing seo" on 10 October 2026. Nearly all of them say the same thing: Google changes and competitors don't stand still. None of them says how much Google changes, how many links are lost in a year or how old the page ranking first today is. Those numbers are below, taken from the original sources, along with data from two projects we have followed for years.
One-off SEO and ongoing SEO: where the line falls
The line falls between what you do once and then holds up on its own, and what stops working if nobody touches it. The choice between one-off and ongoing depends on how much of your site sits in the second column.
| Done once (one-off) | Goes out of date if nobody follows it (ongoing) |
|---|---|
| Site architecture and URL structure | Rankings on competitive queries, which competitors attack every month |
| Migration or rebuild, with the redirects | Inbound links: some are lost every year on their own |
| Setting up Search Console, GA4 and basic structured data | Content with figures, prices and dates that age |
| Technical fixes found in an audit | Effects of core updates, which arrive several times a year |
| Choice of CMS and theme | The shape of the results page: AI Overview, local pack, video, shopping results |
An SEO audit is the typical one-off job: it takes a snapshot of the site and hands over a list of fixes. If nobody carries them out and then checks them again, the snapshot is good for a few months.
There's also the opposite case, and it should be said. A six-page brochure site, in a sector where no competitor publishes anything, can live for a long time on a good initial setup and a yearly check. On Google UK's first page almost nobody admits this. Web Design and SEO Company, asking "Is SEO a one time thing?", answers "Unfortunately, the short answer is no!", and the most it concedes elsewhere (SEOBoost) is that one-off SEO suits a new site setting up the basics or a limited budget. We'd put it more plainly: ongoing SEO makes sense when there is something to follow after launch. The question is how fast that "something" moves, and on that the numbers exist.
What goes out of date in SEO, and how fast
Every item in the table below has a primary source and a measured speed. It's the concrete reason an SEO job doesn't end on delivery.
| What changes | How much, measured | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Google's algorithm | 4,781 changes to Search in 2023, about 13 a day, after 719,326 search quality tests and 16,871 live traffic experiments | Google, How Search Works |
| Core updates | 3 in 2025 (13 March, 30 June, 11 December), 2 so far in 2026 (27 March, 21 May); each took between 11 and 18 days to roll out | Google Search Status Dashboard |
| Days with an update rolling out | About 75 in 2025, roughly one day in five (three core updates plus the August spam update, which lasted 26 days) | Visilay calculation from the durations published on the Status Dashboard |
| Inbound links | 66.5% of links to a sample of 2,062,173 websites, found since 2013, no longer exist; counting temporary errors as well, 74.5% are lost for SEO purposes | Ahrefs, Patrick Stox, updated 2024 |
| Pages on the web | 38% of pages that existed in 2013 could no longer be reached ten years later; 23% of news pages contain at least one broken link | Pew Research Center, 2024 |
| Shape of the UK results page | AI Overviews live in the UK since 15 August 2024 |
The figure that strikes us most is the third. It isn't a number Google publishes: we worked it out by adding up the rollout durations Google itself publishes. In 2025, for about one day in five, a ranking update was in progress. A site that gets looked at once a year has a good chance of being checked during one of those rollouts, when rankings are swinging and don't yet mean anything. 2026 has been no quieter: the September spam update alone ran from 24 September to 7 October.
The link figure is the one that surprises clients most. Backlinks behave like capital that depreciates: some are lost because the linking page is deleted, moved or rebuilt, without you doing anything wrong. The Ahrefs study measures exactly this, over nine years of data. The Pew study looks at it from the other side: if 23% of news pages have at least one broken link, the outbound links on your own site need checking again too.
Why old pages hold the top positions
The pages at the top of Google are, on average, pages someone has looked after for years. It's the number that best explains why ongoing SEO exists.
In 2025 Ahrefs repeated a 2017 study on how long it takes to rank. The results, published by Patrick Stox on a sample of US keywords:
- only 1.74% of recently published pages reach the top ten within a year; in 2017 it was 5.7%;
- 72.9% of pages in the top 10 are more than three years old;
- the page in first position is five years old on average, against two in 2017;
- of the few pages that make the top 10, 40.82% get there within the first month.
The sample is American, and on mid-competition UK queries the first page is often less crowded. But we see the same direction in our own projects, and that's what counts: top positions build up over time. A page published and left alone has little chance of climbing. A page updated for three or five years, with internal links and content growing around it, is the profile of whoever ranks first. We cover this in detail in the guide to how long SEO takes.
The second figure to read carefully is the last one. Pages that make it often make it quickly. The others stay put. Ongoing SEO is mainly there to find out early which pages are getting in and which aren't, and to move the work onto the ones that have a chance.
Five years of continuous work on a real case: Macropix
Macropix is a Milan-based maker of custom LED screens. The SEO project started in 2020, when the site didn't appear for any of the sector's category keywords on Google Italy. These are some of the numbers five years on, already published in our guide to SEO for manufacturers.
| Keyword (Italian) | Monthly searches | Position 2020 | Position 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| ledwall (LED wall) | 4,400 | not present | 1 |
| ledwall prezzo (LED wall price) | 720 | not present | 1 |
| schermo pubblicitario (advertising screen) | 480 | 73 | 2 |
| monitor pubblicitario (advertising monitor) | 390 | 88 | 2 |
| totem led (LED totem) | 260 | 31 | 3 |
In July 2026, on the "ledwall" keyword cluster, Macropix held a 25.55% share of voice. Amazon.it was second with 18.08% (source: Semrush). The detail of the work is on the Macropix project page.
The point, for this article, is time. There was no single decisive fix: the climb from 88 to 2 on "monitor pubblicitario" is the result of five years of continuous work on the whole structure of the site. A one-off contract in 2020 would have fixed the site. It wouldn't have brought those rankings.
On shorter timescales we have two more recent examples, both anonymous and already published, both Italian. On a site in the dental sector, in eight months the average position went from 47.5 to 16.9, while clicks per day only rose from 1.31 to 1.78. On a solar energy site, in the six months from March 2026 the keywords on page one went from 1 to 38 out of 143 tracked, and monthly organic impressions from 329 to 5,809. Neither number was the finish line: they were the first bend.
What happens when SEO stops
When SEO stops, rankings don't usually collapse straight away: they slide a little at a time, because the site stays the same while the results page around it changes. Visibility on Google is relative. You lose ground even without making mistakes, simply because someone else keeps going.
A documented example comes from MacMillan Design, a US agency, which describes the case of a company that had reached good rankings: it stopped its SEO work in April 2024 and within a year saw its visibility halved, while competitors kept investing. It's a single American case, and it should be read as an example of the mechanism.
There's a second reason pauses cost money, and it's written in Google's documentation on core updates. Google says rankings aren't fixed and that a small drop, from 2 to 4, doesn't call for drastic action. But it adds that if no effect is visible after a few months of improvements, you may have to wait for the next core update. With three core updates a year, a recovery that misses one cycle costs four months.
If your question is exactly when to stop, we deal with it separately in the article on when you can stop doing SEO. If the drop has already happened, the diagnosis starts from the guide to a drop in website traffic.
What a month of ongoing SEO contains
A well-run month of ongoing SEO is mostly work on pages that already exist, and only partly new pages. This is the rhythm we use on our projects, with the data sources we look at.
| Frequency | Task | Where we look |
|---|---|---|
| Every month | Queries between position 8 and 20 to push, pages losing clicks with stable impressions, new pages or sections | Google Search Console |
| Every month | Broken outbound links and redirect chains, pages that have dropped out of the index | Search Console, Screaming Frog |
| Every quarter | Updating content with old data, merging or pruning weak pages | Search Console, GA4 |
| Every quarter | Link profile: lost links, new domains linking to competitors | Semrush or Ahrefs |
| After every core update | Comparing the two weeks after the rollout ends with the two weeks before it started | Search Console |
| Every six months | Shape of the results page on the main keywords: AI Overview, local pack, video | Manual search and rank tracking tools |
The full list, split by frequency, is in our SEO checklist. Two items deserve a separate word: content pruning, which in our view is the most underrated, and the before-and-after comparison around an algorithm update, which should be done once the rollout has finished.
For the part that concerns generative answers, the logic is the same. AI Overviews arrived in the UK in August 2024 and on some queries they fill the first screen: on 10 October 2026 Google UK showed one at the top for both "ongoing seo" and "monthly seo". A check on the shape of the results page every six months is the minimum; in sectors where AI answers cover most informational queries, it should be done more often.
How to tell if ongoing SEO is working
You measure it with several indicators, each on its own timescale. In the first three months, what counts is impressions and the number of queries the site appears for. Between the sixth and twelfth month, it's organic clicks on non-branded queries. Leads come last. The SEO KPIs in the report should be chosen with this in mind, otherwise after three months the work gets judged on a number that couldn't have moved yet.
If you work with an outside supplier, the most useful check is to ask which pages were changed in the month and why. We've written a guide on how to tell if your SEO agency is working; the comparison between in-house SEO and an agency helps you decide who should do the recurring work.
On price: an ongoing fee buys a number of hours a month, and the way to read a quote is to ask how many hours it buys. On Google UK's first page for "monthly seo" on 10 October 2026, packages were advertised from £495 a month (Neometa, website build included) and, from a US agency, from $500 a month (WebFX); neither figure tells you the hours. Prices read one by one are in the article on how much SEO costs. If you want a view on which part of your site needs ongoing work and which doesn't, it's the kind of analysis we do at the start of every SEO consultancy project.
The wrong line item in contracts
Many ongoing SEO quotes we get to read measure the work in articles: four a month, eight a month. It's the wrong unit. The numbers above say that top positions are held by pages that are years old and that links wear out on their own; so the part of the work that pays most is the work on pages that already exist. In a monthly report, the line to read first is how many old pages were rewritten, merged or removed, and with what result. If that line isn't there, you're paying for a blog, not for ongoing SEO.
Frequently asked questions
One-off SEO is a closed piece of work, such as an audit, a migration or a technical clean-up, delivered once. Ongoing SEO is the recurring work, usually monthly, that tracks rankings, updates content, checks links and responds to core updates. The first sets the site up, the second makes it grow.
It depends on the competition. On competitive category keywords it takes years: according to a 2025 Ahrefs study, the page in first position is five years old on average. For a local brochure site with few active competitors, a good initial setup and a yearly check can be enough.
Rankings usually don't collapse straight away but slide a little at a time, because competitors keep going and some links are lost on their own: Ahrefs found that 66.5% of links found since 2013 no longer exist. According to Google, recovering after a drop may mean waiting for the next core update.
Thousands. In 2023 Google made 4,781 changes to Search. Core updates, the ones that move rankings most, numbered three in 2025 and two in 2026 up to October, each taking between 11 and 18 days to roll out.
It depends on how fast it ages. A page with prices, statistics or references to tools should be checked at least every quarter. A good signal for choosing which to update first is in Search Console: pages with stable impressions and falling clicks.
No. It's worth it when there is something to follow after launch: competitors publishing, several services or areas, a catalogue that changes. For a site of a few pages in a sector that doesn't move, good one-off work and a yearly check are often enough.
