One of our most asked questions by clients is ‘How long will it take to get us to page 1 of Google?’ and unfortunately, the simple answer is that there is no simple answer.
In most clients’ minds, success for them in a search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign means ranking #1 on Google and other search engines, such as Bing and YouTube. Once they reach that position, those companies then go on to ask whether they need to continue with SEO and if so, for how long. Some may even believe that since their site is fully optimised, the right keywords for their business will continue to rank no matter what they do.
However, this is, unfortunately not the case and SEO needs to be a long-term and sometimes, a life-long strategy for it to be successful. That is why as a digital marketing agency, we set up and maintain long term relationships with all of our clients, especially when it comes to our SEO services.
Why You Shouldn’t Stop Doing SEO
The reason why you shouldn’t stop doing SEO is that your search engine keyword rankings will start to decline, causing your site traffic to decrease and your brand’s visibility to drop off. Although you may find that your search rankings don’t immediately slip and that traffic levels stay relatively stable, unfortunately, this will only be short-lived and your website’s exposure will eventually die a slow and painful death.
SEO is unfortunately not a start and pause strategy that gains results as soon as you click publish. If you’re wanting to see more short-term and immediate results, strategies, such as pay-per-click advertising (PPC) on search engines and social media may be more suitable.
This is because you can create ads that have a budget behind them and are targeted to a specific audience to drive results depending on your business goals, such as engagements, traffic and conversions. Another key benefit of PPC is it is intent-driven. People are actively searching for a product or service rather than being interrupted by interstitials or story feeds.
SEO, on the other hand, is a long-term strategy, where results are naturally seen a few months down the line and for an SEO campaign to be successful, you need to put in a lot of time, effort, research and patience. Once you’ve reached that sweet spot on the top of page one on Google, it is critical to carry on with the work and not lose that momentum, otherwise, your competition will outrank you and potentially steal your trade.
What Will Happen If I Stop Doing SEO?
There are a range of things that will happen to your website, overall online presence and brand’s visibility if you stop doing SEO, which we’ll explain right here.
Firstly and most importantly, which has already been briefly discussed, your search results and rankings will eventually start to decline and there are a few reasons why this happens:
Lack Of Fresh And Relevant Content
Google values fresh and relevant content that offers its users information relating to their search query or solutions to their problems and websites that offer this type of content on a regular basis are proven to dominate organic rankings.
This is because when you add new content, crawlers will return to your website to index that new content, giving you more chances to rank on search engines and appear on search engine results pages (SERPs).
There are also a few other things that happen when you stop posting content:
- You stop targeting new keywords that users are searching for
- You stop creating new pages that can be linked to externally, resulting in a lower amount of backlinks
- You stop capturing new visitors that can be added to your remarketing audiences, which can be used for search engine and social media advertising as well as email sign-ups.
- You stop creating content that can be used on pillar pages, which are master pages that can link to other pages on the same topic.
- You stop creating content that can be shared on social media, reducing social media following and engagement and will also stop driving traffic to your site.
- You stop encouraging people to return to your site for more content, reducing branded searches, which are a quality indicator for Google.
In a nutshell, if you stop creating content, you’re basically telling Google that your website isn’t as active as it once was and no longer offers users as valuable content as others so you won’t be ranked as well.
Coming straight from our content marketers, there are some ways in which you can refresh content, including rewriting content that includes new keywords that have been newly researched, making content longer, changing the page template or layout to give a better user experience (UX), adding FAQs, schema and more internal and external links and finally, updating any facts, dates and statistics that may be out of date.
Tougher Competition
Most successful businesses invest in SEO and competitor research forms a huge part of any SEO strategy. The most successful campaigns learn from their competitors and adapt accordingly. You can see what they do well with and copy or look for things that they don’t do and use that as an opportunity.
If you then rank well for certain terms, you’ll find that your competitors will be watching you too to spot any opportunities that will help them come up with new and innovative strategies in order to outrank you. If you stop SEO, then they’ll overtake you and gain business that could’ve been yours.
Algorithm Updates
Google updates their algorithm every day, some of which are minor and don’t affect rankings as much, but others, such as their core updates, change SEO best practices entirely. SEO strategies and campaigns that have previously helped rank your website can be made obsolete so without an SEO specialist or strategy at all, you can leave yourself susceptible to these types of changes, causing your rankings to slip.
Technical Issues
If you stop doing SEO, then you’ll stop monitoring your website’s technical issues. This means that you won’t realise when things on your website break, which is more often than not, for no reason. You’ll also stop realising when content gets duplicated or when your website starts to slow down.
Technical issues can easily add up and become more and more difficult to fix in a short amount of time, especially on your own. It’s super important to stay technically sound, especially with new developments, such as mobile, usability, page speed, AMP and more.
We recommend to always keep up to date with technical SEO and to not just ignore them, because it can cost you further down the line. If you ignore technical issues, your website will slow down and break, resulting in lower rankings and traffic as Google will spot these problems. Ignore them for long enough and you’ll unfortunately no longer be able to compete in the market.
How Can Digital Ethos Help You?
After reading this blog, we hope we have convinced you to not stop doing SEO and the reasons why you shouldn’t. SEO can be the start of an incredible and impactful strategy that improves your brand’s search rankings and online visibility, which will, in turn, help your business grow.
Despite it being a long-term strategy that requires a lot of time, effort, skill and patience, the work that is involved to create and update content along with the technical issues that are easily solved if they’re on your radar, all improve your bottom line.
If you and your business ever need any assistance with your marketing strategies and campaigns, our talented SEO team at Digital Ethos can help so please don’t hesitate to contact us by calling 0333 772 0189 or emailing us at hello@digitalethos.net. Our extensive range of high quality services is proven to help any type of business with their digital marketing and SEO efforts.