Businesses sometimes want to pause and then resume their SEO efforts later. While some believe a break would not have any consequences, we’d like to enlighten clients about the potential outcomes.
“It is challenging to bring a website back on track once it starts moving in the opposite direction.”
If you don’t post content, what will happen?
If you cease publishing content, the following outcomes might occur.
- Your inconsistency in targeting new keyword terms will cause a decrease in new keyword rankings and resulting traffic.
- If you stop making new pages that can be linked to, the number of links you receive will decrease.
- You will halt the process of gathering new visitors to include in your remarketing audiences, email and push notification lists.
- You no longer create content that can be used to create hub pages. These pages act as main pages that connect to all other pages on the same topic and are known to rank higher in search results.
- You are no longer producing content that can be shared on social media, resulting in decreased social media shares and traffic.
- By not promoting return visits to your website, your number of branded searches decreases, which Google considers a metric of your website’s quality.
In general, if you stop adding new content to your website, it gives Google the impression that your website is becoming less active over time, possibly leading to a decline in its ranking.
When you stop monitoring technical issues related to your site
People with no web experience should be aware that technical issues can arise on websites even without any apparent cause. It is rare to find a website completely free of technical SEO problems.
Neglecting to oversee the technical elements of your website could result in problems like the one stated below:
- Your website is prevented from being accessed by robots through the use of a robots.txt file.
- You are creating content that is the same as other content.
- One of your development sites has been mistakenly indexed and is showing in the search results.
If you don’t consistently monitor and fix things, they will accumulate. Having a website might be compared to a garden that needs maintenance to avoid becoming overgrown.
Staying technically accurate is crucial, especially with the emergence of advancements in fields such as mobile usability, page speed, AMP, and others.
If you don’t update your tech stack, you may experience errors in the future that can be costly. Additionally, an outdated tech stack can eventually leave you unable to compete in the market.
If you don’t refresh your pages
Correctly refreshing a page can increase traffic to that page by 10% to 30%, or sometimes even more, because Google recognizes the new and valuable content and ranks it higher.
There are various methods for performing refreshes:
- Include FAQs on the page
- Add links to other blog posts or articles
- Update facts
- Update dates
- Add more information to make the text longer
- Add schema
- Change the page template
When refreshing a page, it is crucial to ensure that it matches the search intent and is superior to the current top-ranking page. Our approach involves searching, classifying the query by intent, evaluating the leading pages, devising a new strategy for your target page, and then refreshing it accordingly.
If you don’t build new pages
Some industries find it more challenging to create new web pages than others. For instance, in our experience working with manufacturing companies, there were very few lower-funnel terms. This is in contrast to massive e-commerce sites such as Amazon, which have an endless amount of terms.
At Young Caesar, we think websites should continuously aim to attract new search terms. The search terms should be classified into segments and ranked based on business objectives, and used to monitor the progress of each segment.
Stopping the creation of new pages can result in losing keyword growth momentum. We strongly advise creating new pages for SEO purposes. These new pages can also serve as effective landing pages for paid media and paid search.
You can enhance the quality score of your website and increase conversion rates by creating more landing pages for targeting specific keywords and audiences as the website grows. Discontinuing this practice will cause you to lose your competitive edge. In the future, those who can convert traffic for lower costs will emerge victorious on the web.
If you don’t watch out for bad links
Keeping up with SEO is critical in managing your backlink profile, as spammy links have become increasingly prevalent. Neglecting SEO can result in an uncontrollable backlink profile. By monitoring your backlinks, you can observe any instances of this occurring.
- Sometimes, people unintentionally keep the links to your website when they scrape your content.
- You receive notifications from Google about websites that have been hacked by malware.
- Your site is targeted by competitors attempting to use negative SEO tactics.
Not regularly updating your disavow file can potentially harm your website’s rankings. We now update the file weekly for clients in highly competitive industries.
If you don’t guard against stolen content
Choose a block of text about three sentences in length from your top-ranking landing page on your website. Enclose the text in quotation marks and search for it on Google. Other websites may have stolen your content, and it might show up in the search results.
Consider the consequences if this occurs on multiple pages of your website. This can be extremely damaging. Frequently, we discover that someone has copied an entire website, taken dominant pages, or copied specific sections of a page.
If you encounter a problematic site, take the following steps:
- Revise the content on your website.
- Request the other site to remove it.
- Use a DMCA if necessary.
- Think about sending them a cease and desist letter.
- Occasionally, you can contact the hosting company and ask them to take down the site.
Not monitoring for stolen content can harm your business and rankings. It is crucial to address this issue promptly.
Final Thoughts
In summary, it is best practice to continue doing SEO because it is a valuable tool that enhances your search rankings and promotes your business growth. Creating and updating content and addressing technical issues help improve your overall profitability and are vital to maintaining your competitive edge.
