What Happens If You Stop Doing SEO?

When SEO is stopped on a website, it can be difficult to reverse the momentum once rankings start to decline.

As a digital marketing professional, I often watch businesses enlist the help of a search engine optimization company for a few months and then abandon the project altogether.

They are under the impression that it won’t cause any problems.

But when you have a client that wants to stop their digital marketing campaigns, you have the data to cover the details of what the repercussions can be.

When You Stop Posting Quality Content

When you stop publishing quality content, these things can happen:

• Your targeted keywords and terms are no longer being used consistently, resulting in fewer rankings and less traffic. Momentum starts to be lost.
• New pages are no longer created, resulting in fewer backlinks.
• Visitors are not being captured on the site, so there are no re-marketing audiences, fewer push notifications, and email subscribers that may unsubscribe.
• The content generation process stops, and hub pages, which are anchors on the website that link to the other related pages, no longer rank well.
• Content generation stops, and media does not get shared on social media channels, the business loses out on social media likes, shares, and traffic.
• People stop returning to your website because there are no posts being generated. There is a drop in traffic because rankings start to decline. This also reduces branded searches, which are ranking factors and quality indicators to Google.

The bottom line is that when you stop creating quality content, Google views your website as inactive and starts to devalue the website as informative and up to date. This causes the site to lose valuable rankings.

Technical Issues Should Be Handled

As a digital marketer, you realize that technical issues should be handled promptly to avoid issues related to user experience and ranking algorithms. The truth is that online, things break for no reason at all, and they must be fixed.

Have you ever come across a website with no technical issues? There is always some process that can be improved when it comes to technical work with no SEO issues.

When the technical aspects of a website are not being monitored, problems can arise. Common problems include robots.txt blocking your website from being crawled by Google. Low quality or duplicate content gets generated, or your development website gets indexed.

When your search marketing expert is not monitoring these kinds of issues and fixing them as they occur, problems can start to add up fast. The process of no SEO is very much like gardening. It takes consistent work and maintenance, or weeds, like technical search issues, start to take over.

It is very important to maintain the technical search on a website. The maintenance can save a company money as they won’t have do deal with bigger problems and higher costs down the line. It’s also critical to keep your website updated so that it does not become stale and obsolete.

When Pages Are Not Refreshed

When pages are refreshed, traffic increases up to 30% or more to that particular page. This happens because Google will find new text that provides value, and it works to rank it higher in search.

There are a few ways to refresh pages, like updating dates and facts, adding more text to a post or a page, updating frequently asked questions, creating relevant links to other pages, adding schema, and even by changing the template of a page.

One good way to refresh a page is by making sure it is relevant so that it matches the user’s search intent while making your page better than the number one search result for your topic. This is also a good way to rank in Google.

A great winning strategy is to search for your topic and categorize the search query based on user intent, analyze the top-ranking pages, develop a new digital marketing strategy for the page you want to rank, and refresh the page based on your findings.

When You Stop Building New Pages

Generating content for new pages can be difficult for some types of companies than for others.

When working with a few accounting firms, it was evident that the lower funnel key terms and topics were sparse. Then there are some companies like with e-commerce where there are endless terms to build pages around.

While this is reality for a digital marketer, companies should always be targeting new terms for their websites and organizing them into different segments. Segments need to be prioritized with regards to the goals of the business and tracked for rankings every step of the way.

When a digital marketer stops creating content and building new pages, keyword and topic momentum slows to a stop.

It is highly recommended that pages be created for search, and they can serve a dual purpose and can be useful for paid media and paid search as well.

As a site grows in popularity, it is a good idea to make more landing pages that target specific topics and unique audiences. This is a great way to increase the quality score on the page as well as conversion rates.

When you stop building new pages, businesses lose their competitive edge. The best digital marketing firms know that the future of search lies in the ability to convert visitors into customers for less cost.

When You Stop Checking for Poor Quality Backlinks

Backlink profiles are essential, and when search engine optimization is no longer being done on a website, the profile can start to look shady. Spammy backlinks are a detriment to any quality website.

Websites must be monitored by a digital marketer because people scrape content and leave the links in place. Sites can be hacked with malware, and competitors may try to sabotage your successes with negative search engine optimization.

Your search engine optimization expert should monitor and update your disavow file at least once a month so that your website rankings remain in pristine condition. If your business is in a competitive industry, you may want to consider weekly monitoring.

When You Stop Looking for Stolen Content

It is relatively easy to see if someone has stolen your content. Simply copy three lines or more of text to one of your top landing pages, put the text in quotes, and Google it. If you see your content copied exactly into other website search results, it has been stolen.

You will want to consider the impact this could have across multiple pages on your website. It can be devastating, and you could lose rankings and valuable traffic.

When this happens, it needs to be fixed. Your digital marketer can arrange to have the content on your site rewritten. They can also have the other website to take the copied down, a DMCA can be filed, or you can arrange to send a cease and desist legal letter if the first two options don’t work. You can also make the request of their hosting company to see if they will remove the site.

Because of the negative impact, stolen content can have on your website, and this is something you will want to monitor each month as well.

Reasons Why You Should Never Stop Doing SEO

There are countless reasons not to stop doing search engine optimization. It is critical to stay ahead of the competition and improve your search rankings so that your business can grow and thrive. Content creation, technical search, page refreshes, and protective measures all contribute to your company’s success in a big way.

If you are considering to stop doing SEO or are looking for a data driven SEO agency that with get you the results you expect, contact us today to schedule a no-obligation call to see if we are a good fit.

What Happens If You Stop Doing SEO?