What Happens When You Stop Doing SEO?

Consistently performing search engine optimization—SEO—on your website can be time-consuming. Or, if you pay an SEO agency to do the work for you, it can be expensive. This may leave you wondering: What happens when you stop doing SEO?

Not giving your website and online presence the time and attention it needs, especially in the face of frequent updates and changes to the industry, can lead you to lose visitors, clients, and money.

Here’s what happens when you stop putting time, effort, and money into these SEO tasks for your website:

You Stop Publishing New Content

If you’re not publishing new content, the search engines have nothing new to use when ranking your website. So, if trends in your industry have changed, or the way the search engines crawl and rank content changes, then your website will be left in the dust.

Here are some things that are likely to happen to your website and online presence if you stop publishing new content:

You won’t consistently target new terms. The way people search online changes, and it’s essential to keep up with those shifts. The fewer new keywords you rank for, the less traffic your website will see.
Your ability to earn new links drops. When you don’t consistently create new content, you give other websites fewer reasons to link to you, limiting the chances that you’ll build a robust backlink profile.
You limit new visitors and leads. When your content is stale, visitors have fewer reasons to come to your website and sign up for things like your email list. This limits your ability to gather new leads and new business.
You stop creating content for social media shares. New content gives you more fresh pieces to share on social media, which is free, easy traffic to your website. When you don’t have anything new, you lose out on an important source of traffic.
You stop encouraging return visitors. New visitors are great, but return visitors to your website also help boost your rankings with the search engines. When you don’t give your visitors new content that makes them want to come back to your site, you can lose rankings.

In short, if you stop creating content, the search engines think you’ve abandoned your website and start a slow downward spiral for your rankings and traffic.

You Stop Watching for Technical Issues

Elements of your website can break without any real reason. And if you aren’t regularly checking for issues and errors, those broken elements can keep people from having a good experience on your website—or visiting your website at all.

Frequently checking on the technical health of your website, especially things such as mobile usability, page speed, and whether or not installed plugins are working correctly, means you can better head off issues that could pose problems to your visitors.

You Don’t Refresh Current Content

Refreshing a page is an easy way of boosting traffic to it—an average of 10% to 30% and sometimes more. Search engines see the new text and the value it provides, causing the page to rank higher.

Some ways you can refresh current content include:

Adding FAQs
Adding links to other articles
Updating facts and dates
Making the text longer
Adding schema
Changing a page template

Similarly to not adding new content, not refreshing your existing pages shows the search engines that you’ve abandoned your website and mean that you’re less likely to draw new traffic.

You Don’t Check for Stolen Content

With brands all over the world competing for attention online—with not all of them using legitimate methods to get noticed—the risk that your content will be stolen and posted on someone else’s website is real.

If you’re not checking to see if your content is on other websites, you’re missing out on the traffic and leads that those stolen sites are getting. An easy way to check this is to copy a few sentences of text from your highest-ranking page and paste it into Google with quotation marks on either side, you may discover that someone’s stolen your content—or even duplicated your entire website.

Not checking routinely for duplications like this could greatly impact your business and your reputation, so staying on top of this task is essential.

Your Partners in SEO Strategy & Execution

Your website deserves to be cared for and monitored routinely, but it can be difficult when you’re just trying to run your business. At 270net Technologies, our team of SEO specialists can help you craft a strategy that will move you ahead of the competition, and we take care of all the hard work that gets you there. Schedule a consultation today!