You already know the importance of SEO because you have already reaped the benefits and reached your goal of ranking high in search engine results. So what do you have to do next?
Perhaps, you are wondering if you still need to keep your partnership with an SEO company. Could you stop using SEO? What will happen to your business if you stop?
This article will shed light on these questions to help you decide whether you need to keep investing in SEO or not.
Lower Rankings
Since SEO aims to improve your ranking in search engine research pages (SERPs), your ranking will start to decrease if you stop doing SEO. Although it may take a longer time for you to see this happening, it will happen. It will lead to less organic website traffic and less online visibility.
And you know what less organic traffic to your website can do to your business. You will lose potential new clients and sales. If you have already succeeded in building credibility and trust in your brand, it may take a long time for this to happen, but eventually, you will see your ranking dip.
Your Competitors Will Outrank You
When you decide to take a break from using SEO, and your competitors continue doing SEO, they will outrank you faster than if you didn’t take a break. Lower ranking means you would lose visitors who come to your website from organic search engine listings based on keywords relevant to your business.
Although being outranked may not significantly affect your already well-established business as you will still see a steady number of visitors in the first few days or weeks, eventually, the numbers would decline. And in a highly digital business model, a relatively small decrease in online rankings could affect not only the potential for more growth of your business as you lose potential new clients but could also affect the sales from your old clients.
It Could Affect Your Business’s Credibility
When your business’ ranking in search engines begins to decline and online visibility decreases, online users might assume something is wrong with your business. They could think that the credibility and trust rating of your business has declined. And since most online users assume that a website is trustworthy based on its rankings on search engine listings. Therefore, your website’s decreased ranking could mean that your business is no longer and cannot be trusted.
Missed Opportunities
Taking a break from your partnership with an SEO company means you will miss out on opportunities to generate more leads and possible sales. Below are some of the opportunities you might miss out on:
- Returning visitors
If you don’t update your content (content marketing), your old clients and current leads might become bored and decide not to come back anymore. Losing them means losing sales.
- Decreased backlinks
If you don’t post new content, you will lose the opportunity for other websites to link to you. Backlinks help you become an authority in your industry, and becoming an authority increases your trust and credibility ranking.
- Decreased new audience
If you don’t publish new content, there will be less material that you could share on your social media platforms to capture a new audience.
Stolen Content
Having SEO employed in your website also means analysing for security threats. And it is not just about possible infection with malware; it could also mean theft of your content. Without SEO continuously analysing your data and cross-referencing it with your competitors’ data, you might miss out on your content copied and used by other websites. Duplicated content might alert search engines of the decreased quality of your website and start ranking you lower.
SEO is an amazing tool that helps your business grow, and if you stop doing SEO, the results could be catastrophic for your business. And the truth is, once your business starts to decline, it is hard to reverse it. It will take some time, even if you rebrand your business. So think twice or many times before you decide to take a break from doing SEO. In these uncertain times, staying relevant is very important, and SEO helps your business to remain relevant.
