Introduction
It’s important to keep up on SEO because it’s an ongoing process. Here’s why.
It can be tempting to stop performing SEO for a while for several reasons—perhaps because of budgetary constraints, a poor SEO service experience, or because you weren’t pleased with your results.
Should you pause your SEO efforts? What are the repercussions?
Doing SEO is Like Running a Marathon
If you stop running a marathon because you’re easily exhausted, your competitors will leave you in the dust.
SEO is a marathon because it’s a long-term marketing strategy. It can take up to 12 months to see results from an SEO campaign.
The journey to success with SEO looks different for every company. Some choose to focus on keyword research and increasing traffic to their homepage. Others focus on link building and improving the search engine rankings of blog posts. No matter which path you choose, the one thing you can’t do is give up. If you want to see results from your SEO campaign, you have to be patient and consistent.
It takes time, effort, and dedication to reach the finish line. But compared to other marketing strategies, SEO is a low-cost, long-term approach to generating traffic to your site.
You must assess your competition before deciding to stop investing time and money in SEO. Unless you stop doing SEO, your competitors will pass you by, and catching up with them will be difficult. Every day, Google makes 12 changes to its search engine, which means you have millions of competitors per keyword and website upkeep that must be done to avoid a poor-quality website, which will make it even more challenging to rank.
Endurance is the key to SEO success. If Google ceases to alter its algorithms and all of your competitors disappear, SEO will cease to exist.
5 Reasons Why You Shouldn't Stop doing SEO
Can’t stop, won’t stop. Here are five reasons why you should not stop.
Reason #1 > You'll Drop Out of Search
Google is constantly updating its search engine. In 2020 alone, Google ran over 600,000 experiments, resulting in over 4,500 improvements to search. That’s 12 changes per day, people. Some modifications are minor, while others are significant. Many are detected, while many more fly under the radar. Many businesses aren’t competent at understanding how these adjustments affect their websites. As a result, SEOs spend hours testing and analyzing Google changes to benefit their clients and employers.
Google constantly updates its search algorithm to filter out spammy, irrelevant, low-quality content. When you stop investing in SEO, your site will likely be flagged by Google as spam and pushed down in the search results.
The bottom line? If you quit doing SEO, your website still drop out of Google’s search. For this reason alone, you can’t just throw SEO out the window.
Reason #2: Millions of Competitors Are Online
Have you done a Google search lately?
Do one right now. Go to Google and Search “what is SEO?”
When we just did this search, we found 469M results.
When you search on Google, you’ll notice that any query can yield millions or billions of results.
Even though there are millions of results, your content somehow must appear on page one. Furthermore, you desire your content to appear among the initial few results on the page if you want more clicks.
Why is appearing at the top of Google so important?
Because ALL of the traffic is on Google’s first page.
When you pause your SEO, your competition doesn’t wait.
While your SEO is paused, you’re letting your competition take advantage that you’re no longer improving your product, site, or content.
You can’t afford to squander time if you want to see results from SEO.
It’s also important to remember that SEO takes time.
- New websites take Six to Nine months on ongoing to show at the top of Google.
- Established businesses usually take Three to Six months of SEO to show up at the top of searches.
- Popular businesses require at least 90 days to reach the top of Google.
Reason #3 - Doing SEO is a Full-Time Job
Quality websites can build link and traffic value over time, but SEO is not a set-and-forget procedure. As a business owner, you must stay on top of things to keep up with the technology behind your website.
SEO is a long-term process. Not only do you have to create content, but you also have to promote it. That means you have to spend time writing blog posts, creating social media posts, and optimizing your website for keywords. While SEO takes a lot of time and effort, it’s important that you stick with it. If you don’t, your site could be left behind in the search engine rankings. That could mean fewer visitors and lost business.
Google said in it’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines that “unmaintained/abandoned ‘old’ websites or unmaintained and inaccurate/misleading content is a reason for a low Page Quality rating.”
What does this tell us?
- Google cares about providing a quality experience on websites.
- Abandoned websites won’t show up high in Google searches.
- If you stop SEO, you risk lowering your rankings.
SEO is a full-time job. When you’re working on SEO, you need to be constantly monitoring your site for errors and making changes as needed. You also need to have a plan in place for what you’re going to do when your site is finished. This can take a lot of time and effort, and it doesn’t always pay off. But if you want to rank higher and make more money, it’s worth it. Just remember that SEO isn’t easy—it takes work and dedication—and it doesn’t guarantee that you will see results right away. It takes patience and perseverance.
SEO is Essential
Many businesses give up on SEO because they do not see the desired outcomes. However, the reason is usually that they’ve hired the incorrect SEOs, don’t have adequate funding, or have mismatched expectations.
You should be able to achieve the results you desire if you budget 5% to 10% of your revenue and hire the right SEO expert. Those results typically lead to greater revenue for the company.
Businesses rarely consider stopping SEO as long as it drives revenue. You win the race if you treat SEO as an essential marketing activity for the lifetime of your business. If you give up, you lose.
Your first priority is creating great content, but you also need to optimize that content for search engines. This means making sure your keywords are correct and that there aren’t any technical issues with your site. Finally, you need to build links to your site so that it shows up higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).
What’s Your SEO Score?
Enter the URL of any landing page or blog article and see how optimized it is for one keyword or phrase.