While you may need to reprioritize your efforts on other aspects of your business, choosing to ignore your SEO is a bad idea. For starters, those of us who are thought leaders in our industries have a responsibility. That is to ensure our followers have the most up-to-date information about our products or services. If we don’t consistently offer updates or valuable information, we risk losing out to our competitors.
Additionally, SEO is an on-going effort and without a continual focus on driving organic traffic, we may end up ‘back at zero.’ This blog expands on the 5 reasons not to stop your SEO efforts with explanations on why doing so can elicit a downward trend in your business goals.
Your Brand Could Suffer
According to Neil Patel, one of the great digital marketers of our time, SEO is one of the most valuable tools for building your brand. In a recent blog post, Patel examined why businesses have to keep up with search engine optimization even if it’s an afterthought. The marketing guru explains how SEO plays an integral role in improving a user’s experience, which is also one of Google’s main objectives.
For a brand to rank high on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), it has to meet certain criteria. According to the search engine King, Google, one of those criteria is that it must add value. As an example, if your organization hasn’t published an optimized piece of content in two years, it’s not likely that your website appears on page one.
However, it goes further than content you’re publishing, according to Google. The search engine has very specific guidelines for brands who wish to represent themselves on Google. If these standards are not adhered to, or organizations do not spend ample time optimizing the pages or content they publish, their brand could suffer. When branded searches go down for your company, it’s a sign you need to accelerate your efforts. For instance, if searches for “WebRealSimple” are decreasing, this pings a ‘low quality’ indicator to Google. It means that we need to reassess our current SEO efforts.
Your Site is at Risk for Technical Issues
From a technical standpoint, we don’t recommend halting your SEO efforts. For those of us who don’t monitor the back-end efforts, search engine optimization is more than just adding relevant keywords to your copy. The technical aspects of your site and server that you have control over must continue to be monitored, and those include:
- Page speed: The ideal page speed is 3 seconds or less. If your page speed takes longer, your visitors may go elsewhere. This goes for your ‘responsive’ speed which means desktop and mobile users. If you’re curious about your speed, check it by using Google PageSpeed Insights.
- Site indexing: Did you just search your brand’s name in Google and come up with nothing? If so, you may have an issue with indexation. Simply put, Google considers non-indexed pages as nonexistent and that means they won’t be visible on search engines
- Where are the robots? From a web administrator perspective, it’s important to put technical issues at the forefront. Robots.txt refer to the text files that crawl the internet and index content. The content being crawled should be made available to users based on an admin’s directive: follow or don’t follow. That means if you have a certain page that should be followed and one that shouldn’t be followed by the robots.txt, you’re responsible for notating this.
Your Followers Stop Visiting for New Content
This is one of the instances that we don’t have hard data for. However, we can assume that once we cease efforts to update our search engine optimization, our subscribers will follow suit. Think about how often you check your favorite influencer’s YouTube or social media channel. If you don’t see a recent update, you’ll probably keep scrolling. This directly impacts the amount of engagements on your channel or website.
You Give Your Competitors an Upper Hand
All of the above signals a white flag to your competitors. If you’ve given up on updating your technical SEO and your content has ceased to be updated, others in your industry are likely to take advantage of this. Our competition is always ready for an upper hand, and by ceasing your SEO efforts, you’ve given them just that.
You Have to Start Back at ‘Zero’
Search Engine Optimization is all about giving Google the best results. Helping the search engine giant provide the best answers for all queries is essentially every organization’s cross to bear. With that said, our perennial task is to ensure we’re providing the best information for Google so they can increase (or decrease) the importance and relevance of the backlinks, domain authority, and content that we provide.
This ranking factor isn’t so black and white as it was a few years ago. Considering algorithms were once ‘hand-coded’ back in the day, those same ranking factors are no longer as simple. Thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), the keywords in question will be searched on using the ‘semantic field’. This means an individual who searches for ‘web design company’, may also get a company who specializes in ‘graphic design’ because it fits into the semantics of ‘web design’.
Final Thoughts on Keeping up with SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a difficult concept for any business owner not well-versed in the industry to grasp. As a marketing and web design company, we understand how difficult it is to match pace. If your business is at risk and you’d still like to maintain business continuity, reach out to us. WebRealSimple is willing and able to help local organizations thrive in this time of uncertainty.