So you’ve purchased an SEO plan through a reputable Internet marketing company. They revamped your website and made it mobile friendly, boosted your PPC campaign, and are regularly posting and promoting blogs on your social media accounts among a slew of other beneficial strategies to boost your rankings.
After a few months, a glance at Google Analytics shows that your website has reached the ranking position you were aiming for. Now what?
You Won The Battle, Not The War
What many businesses may not know is that achieving that first page rank is only one battle in the long war to stay at the top. Search engines will always be evolving to better understand the way people search for information, and that means those algorithms could affect where your website stands on the SERPs.
Understand that it takes constant minor adjustments to campaigns and constant SEO research to stay ahead of the curve and remain on top, and your company may not be ready to do that alone. Keeping your professional SEO company around for the long haul will ensure that your website will be kept up to date.
What Happens When You Stop?
According to an experiment performed by James Reynolds from SEOSherpa, a website that is well-maintained and regularly updated with unique, original content will maintain stable rankings for the first couple months if one simply stops SEO cold turkey. It was the fifth month where Reynolds started to see a noticeable dip in organic search traffic.
Note that just because you have stopped an SEO campaign, that doesn’t mean your competitors have! Your site could quickly be overtaken by the competitors you worked so hard to surpass. If no new content is coming to your site, search engines have no reason to index it for new links. No new content also means that others in your industry or even users are less likely to reference your site in the form of a backlink.
Can I Stop During the Off Season?
There will be times when you may think SEO is not worth investing in during your industry’s slower months. This is a thought many of your competitors may be thinking as well — making this the best time of the year to get ahead of the competition.
Say you own an ice cream shop; it’s the dead of winter and sales have slumped. What should you do? Now could be the time to promote some flavors your ice cream shop is experimenting with. Be sure to take to social media and tell the world about how excited you are to release the caramel popcorn chocolate chunk flavor in X amount of days. You could even turn to public relations to get the word out about what you are doing during the off season.
Don’t Slide Into the Abyss
The biggest takeaway here is to know that search engines never sleep! There is no “off season” for Google, Bing, or Yahoo, which means that constantly upkeeping your site with new content and a fresh look will keep both bots and users coming back for more. Don’t be afraid to run your own SEO experiment to see how quickly a website in your industry could slip through the cracks without a well-oiled SEO plan.