What happens if you stop doing SEO?

The ugly truth is that it’s hard to reverse momentum once a website starts going in the wrong direction.

Often, businesses want to stop and start SEO.

Some feel that taking a break won’t cause any issues.

But when a client suggests taking a break, you can explain the details of what will happen.

If you stop posting content correctly

When you stop publishing content, the following things happen:

1. You stop targeting new terms consistently. This results in fewer new keyword rankings and new traffic.
2. You stop creating new pages that can be linked to, and the number of links you earn goes down.
3. You stop capturing new visitors to add to your remarketing audiences, email list and push notification list.
4. You stop generating content that can be used to create hub pages, which are master pages that link to all other pages on the topic. These often rank very well.
5. You stop generating content that gets shared on social media, and thus, generates social media shares and traffic.
6. You stop encouraging people to return to your website for new posts. This reduces your branded searches, which are an indicator of quality to Google.

Overall, if you stop creating content, it says to Google that your website is no longer as active as it was and thus beginning the process of dying a slow death.

If you don’t watch for technical issues

Those without web experience often don’t understand that from a technical perspective, things often break for no real reason.

I’ve never seen a website that did not have at least a handful of technical SEO issues.

If you don’t monitor the technical aspects of your site, issues such as the following could arise:

1. You block your website with robots.txt.
2. You generate duplicate content.
3. You accidentally push your development site into the index.

You can read more about common technical issues here.

When you don’t monitor these things and fix them consistently, they start to add up. Think of it as a garden – it takes maintenance, or it starts to become overgrown.

It is incredibly important to stay technically correct, especially with new developments such as mobile usability, page speed, AMP and more.

If you don’t, you are sure to have an error at some point that will cost you down the line. Similarly, your tech stack will become so out of date that you can no longer compete in the market. – Read more