What happens if you stop doing SEO?

Today I'm going to cover a couple of reasons why you should not stop managing your SEO. Many people have the misconception that taking a break from it will not have any adverse knock-on effects. I'm going to outline some of the things that could happen if you decide to stop maintaining your SEO. 

Posting content

If you stop posting the correct content to your website, several things could happen that will negatively affect your site. Simply put, this pretty much says to Google that your website is no longer actively used and is slowly dying out. 

You will stop targeting new terms consistently, thus resulting in less new keyword rankings and less new traffic to your site. Also, as you stop creating new pages, the number of links you naturally earn will diminish, and you will struggle to capture any new audiences to add to your remarketing campaign, email list and push notification list. 

If you stop creating valuable content, you could miss out on opportunities to create hub pages. These are master pages that link to all of the other pages on a topic and typically rank very highly. These are typically the pages that will rank most and best on Google. 

Additionally, you will not be creating content that could be shared on social media which, as we know, is a massive platform for advertisement if used correctly. It's also worth noting here that your Social Media can too influence your SEO.

Also, it will stop the encouragement of anyone wanting to return to your website for new posts. This can reduce your band searches which are an indicator of quality to Google. 

Watching for technical issues

People without a broad knowledge of search engine optimisation and website elements often struggle to understand the process from a technical perspective. Things can often go wrong for no apparent reason. Very rarely do I see a site that didn't have at least 1 or 2 technical SEO gremlins. 

If you don't keep an eye on your site 3 of the most common issues that can occur are; 

1. You block your website with robots.txt.

2. You could generate duplicate content. 

3. You accidentally push your development site into the index.

Searchengineland has a brilliant blog with more in-depth technical issues that you can read here. 

Without proper care and regular checking of a site, these things can soon start to add up. It's essential to stay technically correct, especially with ever-changing developments such as mobile usability, AMP, page speed and more. If you don't keep on top of your SEO, you could very quickly have an issue that will cost you at a later date or the tech stack (set of technologies used to build a website or application) could become so outdated that you are no longer able to compete in the market. 

Refreshing pages

When refreshing a page, it will generally increase your traffic. 

Note, that if you remove content from a page and update with the page with significantly less content than previously, your site ranking could drop.

By updating your page with new, more relevant and more up to date information, you can increase traffic to that page from anywhere between 10% and 30%. 

There are many ways to refresh a page, some of these are; 

1. Adding FAQ's to the page. 

2. Adding a link to another relevant article. 

3. Updating facts and/or dates.

4. Making text longer.

5. Changing a page template.

Building new pages

Building new pages can be difficult or easy, often depending on the type of business you're working with. For example, a business selling real estate will have a lower rate of funnel terms as opposed to a business selling shoes. 

Although that is the case, I think that websites should always be attempting to target new terms and categorising them by segment. These should then be prioritised based on your business goal and KPI's and tracked in a dashboard. But if you stop building new pages, you will lose keyword growth momentum. 

I would advise creating new additional pages not only for SEO purposes but as they can be useful landing pages for paid search and paid media generally. As a website grows, it's a great idea to make more landing pages to target a more specific audience and more specific keywords. This will help to improve quality scores (Google PPC) and conversions all around. Stopping this process will put you at a competitive disadvantage. 

Looking out for bad links 

Stopping SEO could cause your backlink profile to grow out of control as spammy links are worse than ever before. When monitoring backlinks, you'll see the following happen. People will copy your website content and accidentally keep the links in. You will receive Google alerts from sites that have been hacked by malware and competitors will often try to do negative SEO on your work. 

By not updating your website content at least once per month, you could negatively affect your website's ranking. The more frequently you can update your blog content, especially, the better. 

Watching out for stolen content

Copy a section of text from your landing page and run a copy in quotations through a Google search, and you will likely see other websites corresponding with that content. Some may have even stolen it straight from your website. 

Now think about how that could negatively affect your site if it has happened across multiple pages? I've seen websites completely duplicated, stolen key pages and/or taken key sections from a page. 

When this happens, you should correct it as quickly as possible, and there are several ways this can be done. You could rewrite the stolen content on your site. Refresh it, make it better than before, remember changing content will also help your site to stay more relevant and rank better. You could ask the other site to remove the stolen content or consider contacting a solicitor. If this fails, you could try to contact the hosting company, and they will sometimes remove the site. 

But regardless you should try to catch this straight away as it could have an extremely negative effect on your business and it's rankings. 

Conclusion

Of course, you're not going to stop taking care of your SEO. Why would you? It's an extremely valuable asset to help improve your rankings and to help your business grow. The ongoing work that you do by creating and uploading content along with solving most technical issues all help to improve your overall ranking and thus website traffic. 

Your website will start to fall off the first-page search results if you stop your SEO. Chances are your competitors are consistently working on their SEO, and thus you should continue to work on yours to stay ahead.

It's challenging to reverse momentum once a website starts to head in the wrong direction. But keeping an eye on things makes it very difficult for that to happen. I believe that all things online should be scaled; as the business continues to grow, so should the SEO.