Is stopping your SEO a good idea?

So what happens after you’ve had success with your SEO campaign? Can you save money by stopping your SEO? Many business owners think that SEO is a one-off expense and they’ll maintain their rankings long term. Stopping your SEO is not a good idea as it can drastically affect your revenue.

When clients engage us to work on SEO for their website, they usually have two main questions:-

1. How long will it take to see results?
2. How much is SEO going to cost me?

The answer to both of these questions is “it depends”. Depending on your industry, your competition and demand for your product or service will impact just how much SEO work you need to do to rank highly in search engines.

Quite often, when clients see great results after we’ve done search engine optimisation on their website, they’ll wonder if they still need to put $$$ towards SEO and ask, “should I stop doing SEO on my site?”

The short answer is no, you should always be working on your website’s SEO – at first, it will be to achieve rankings, but then you need to keep working on it to maintain your rankings.

Investing in SEO for your website is a smart business strategy. Here are a few reasons why stopping your SEO is not a good idea:-

Search engines are always changing their algorithm

Search engines change almost daily, and few business owners are aware of this. Tweaks are always being made to how websites are ranked, certain keywords will increase or decrease in popularity, and sometimes the entire search algorithm will have a massive update.

All of these factors can greatly affect your website’s rankings, so to ensure your SEO is working for you, it’s a good idea to be aware of changes within search engines and adjust your strategy accordingly.

You’ll begin to lose rankings and traffic

After you stop your SEO, you'll first notice that you’ll begin to lose rankings and, therefore, traffic. It may not happen immediately – depending on how competitive your industry is, but your rankings are bound to go downhill if you don’t maintain SEO on your website.

Search engines love new content, as it triggers their crawlers to return to your site to re-index. The more often your site is crawled, the more attention you’ll get from search engines, meaning your chances of ranking higher are greater.

As an SEO agency, it’s our job to ensure our clients' websites are updated with fresh, high-quality content, which is why part of our strategy is to write multiple blog articles, services pages and case studies for our clients.

If you stop your SEO, it means search engine crawlers will have no reason to visit your website, meaning you are vulnerable to algorithmic changes and will begin to lose rankings over time.

Your competition will outrank you

If you stop your SEO campaign and your competitors are still working on theirs, they’ll likely surge ahead of you in rankings and, therefore, traffic.

To be successful, you need to stay on top of your competition – the last place you want to be is at the bottom of the pack. A good SEO agency will regularly monitor their client’s competition to find out what they’re doing in terms of SEO and how they can ensure their client stays on top.

If you rank highly for highly-competitive keywords within your industry, you can bet that your competitors (or their SEO consultants) are watching you – stopping your SEO is like handing over the keys to your precious rankings. If you decide to cease working on your SEO and they continue working on theirs, they’ll outrank you in no time.

Technical errors will be missed

Part of a good SEO strategy is monitoring a website to ensure there are no technical issues. Broken links, site speed and usability scores are all factors that affect how well a website ranks within search engines.

If you stop your SEO campaign and there is no one looking out for potential issues, your site’s performance may be affected negatively. Understanding how to fix these issues – or hiring someone that does – is crucial to the success of your website.

You’ll lose more than you think you’ll save

It’s similar to going to the gym – yes, you can go to the gym to get short-term results – be it weight loss or muscle tone, but if you want to keep all of the hard work you’ve done, you need to give it constant attention. It’s the same story with SEO – if you take a long break from the gym, you’ll slowly revert to how you were.

Like taking a break from working out at the gym, once you stop your SEO, it’s hard to regain your website’s rankings and traffic. If you decide to restart your SEO again, it could be like starting from scratch, essentially meaning you’ll lose more $$$$ in the long run.

Ultimately, SEO is a long term strategy that every business needs to employ, and stopping it is not a good idea. Rankings will always move, your competitors may get ahead of you, and your sales and revenue may be affected if you don’t maintain your SEO.

An ongoing, consistent effort to write high-quality content is key rather than starting and stopping SEO when time or budget dictates. If budget is a consideration when stopping your SEO, here's 10 low-cost SEO tips for small business to help you out.

If you’d like to talk with us about SEO for your business, we’d love to chat. Give us a call on (07) 3882 3375 or send us an email, and we’ll offer free advice on implementing an SEO strategy for you.