Why Quitting SEO May Cost You More Than You Think
While SEO remains one of the leading marketing activities to keep your online business alive there are many cases of companies letting go of their SEO strategies. What happens to their website in such scenario? Keep reading to find out what are the costs of quitting SEO!
It’s common to be deterred from investing in SEO efforts, especially if you’re not seeing any immediate results. On the other hand, you might have been successful with your SEO and think there’s no need to continue optimizing. But just how long do you need to be doing SEO? Well, committing to best practices should be a long-term initiative, not something that’s performed and then left alone.
SEO should be a pertinent element of your marketing strategy for as long as consumers are discovering your business via the internet. If you quit doing SEO, your online visibility will enter a sharp decline.
If you’re intrigued to learn about what happens when you stop doing SEO, hold onto your hats and get ready for some in-depth insights!
Why Do People Invest in SEO?
In today’s internet-driven business environments, SEO is an essential component of any successful marketing strategy.
SEO Targets Quality Traffic
As an inbound marketing strategy, SEO makes it easy for your audience to find you at opportune moments. As a customer-centric approach, SEO will help you make helpful information more accessible to your target demographic.
You Don’t Need to Pay for Ads
Organic search rankings are based on what the algorithm works out to be the best search result in any given scenario. If your page is worthy of directing users, you’ll continue to attract traffic to your site in the long term.
It is more of an investment in time than money, but once you’ve invested you won’t need to continue paying to drive traffic to your website.
SEO Helps PR
Link building is what ties SEO to PR. By earning links from reputable websites, you’ll identify opportunities for placement on news publications, industry blogs, and other relevant sites.
This is a component of PR strategy, which is centered on achieving prominent placement within attractive online locations. By working on effective link-building strategies, you’ll discover new ways to distribute content to prospective customers.
Gain a Competitive Advantage
SEO is a staple of any modern marketing strategy. According to insight from Hubspot, 61% of marketers suggest improving SEO efforts and online visibility is a top priority.
As your competitors engage in best SEO practices, it’s important to work on your own strategies to be one step ahead of the game. By doing so, you’ll remain competitive, if not achieve more than your industry counterparts.
Reasons Why You Might Consider Quitting SEO
There will usually be two main reasons for discontinuing your SEO efforts:
- You’ve achieved your goals
- You haven’t achieved your goals
Perhaps You Didn’t Achieve Desired Results?
If you’re frustrated because you haven’t seen desirable results as quickly as you were expecting, it’s important to take a step back and embrace a long-term perspective. It’s important to assess your expectations and work out whether they’re realistic. If you were expecting an army of customers to flood through your business’ digital doors overnight, the chances are you were being too ambitious. It’s common for website owners to set unrealistic goals that can’t be achieved in the short term. While it’s great to aim high, it’s vital you understand the importance of setting realistic short-term goals that you can update as you progress.
SEO requires time. It is an ongoing process where it’s very difficult for effects to be observed overnight. By evaluating your past analytics, you should be positioned to more easily set predictive goals using real data.
By collaborating with a trustworthy SEO expert, you can set benchmarks and embrace recommendations around your unique business goals. Your main objective should be to achieve sustainable growth by bringing in traffic that converts. If your expectations are realistic but you’re yet to observe positive results, perhaps it’s time to reassess your SEO strategy. Your SEO expert should be able to offer recommendations and reshape your strategy to better align with your goals.
It’s important to experiment, learn, and ultimately grow. With a willingness to adjust your strategy in a fast-changing industry, you’ll be poised to meet ever-evolving consumer demands. Just because you haven’t discovered an effective SEO strategy yet doesn’t mean SEO doesn’t work. Be patient and optimistic and you’ll find your feet eventually.
The most reputable SEO agencies understand it takes time to build momentum and achieve sustainable SEO gains. Short-term gains are often penalized by Google, so it’s essential to understand it can take anywhere from a month to a year to get anywhere.
What Can Happen When You Quit Doing SEO?
SEO is a systematic, ever-lasting process. If you quit performing SEO your performance will drop, new websites will rank more effectively for the keywords you’re targeting, and you will stop new users from reaching your website.
When you quit doing SEO, your site’s performance will appear stable in the short term. However, you’ll eventually notice a drop that will require twice the effort to get back on track.
Not posting new content, you miss out on opportunities to rank for new keywords and create pages for other sites to link back to. With fewer keywords and backlinks you’ll get less traffic, which will negatively impact your marketing strategy due to fewer conversions and a disengaged loyal customer base becoming frustrated with the lack of new insights offered.
High-quality SEO content will drive prospective customers to your site, in an environment where users are searching for your brand name. On the contrary, less content and fewer backlinks will result in fewer conversions and lost revenue.
You should also continually optimize your site for technical issues to make it easy for search engines to index your site. Optimizing your page will result in fast page loading times and better mobile performance, two important metrics for ranking your website. When you stop meeting Google’s evolving technical standards, your site will have less authority and rank lower as a result.
Another huge impact is when you stop adding pages to your site. You’ll consequently miss out on opportunities to rank for long-tail keywords, meaning you won’t attract leads that are likely to convert. Landing pages attract people to your website, the same people who will go elsewhere if you’re not building new pages that offer fresh insight.
It is evident from this section that quitting SEO will slow your momentum and certainly impact your search rankings.
Summary
When it comes to SEO efforts, it’s important to appreciate it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Embrace a long-term perspective with a view to sustainable growth, and never be deterred just because you haven’t seen results overnight. Your efforts will pay off eventually, even when your strategy requires some modification along the way. Be flexible and patient and you’ll be en route to achieving your long-term goals.
