Today I would like to share the most commonly asked question by my clients ‘how long does it take to get first-page ranking’?
If a client is more marketing-savvy, he may take one step further and ask, ‘what happens if I stop doing SEO for a while, can I take a break?’
Guess what?
I managed to answer the first question quite smoothly because most of the clients know that SEO is a long-term process and it takes time to deliver results.
But the second question involves me in great trouble.
If you are an SEO professional; you must know Why!
Well, to tell you honestly, my short answer to this troubling question is- No.
And my long answer is, SEO is a cornerstone of your marketing strategy. It gives life to your business, so I would recommend you to never stop doing SEO or until you decide to close your business.
But if you want me to go deep down further, then I can extend it a bit.
You won’t be able to keep up with Algorithmic changes
Panda, hummingbird, penguin, and pigeon are not only the names of animals.
But they are also the major SEO algorithms that manage technical factors and rank webpages according to the relevance.
They have serious impacts on websites and they decide which site should rank first and which should be kicked out of the top 10 list.
All the popular search engines roll out a multitude of updates every single day for the ranking algorithms. Some of the updates are quite minor, they do not affect any ranking factor, but updates like Penguin can change all the SEO practices in a moment.
This means the strategies you have been following previously for your website and helping you dominate search engine rankings may become obsolete in a matter of minutes.
Now let’s imagine, if your website was ranked in the first position and these algorithmic changes have introduced; then they could affect the overall ranking, and without a professional SEO Service Provider working continuously on your site, you won’t be able to sustain the ranking and might even drop out of the top 100 list.
You stop targeting new people through updated content
When you stop doing SEO, it means you stop posting content regularly that can cause a lot of serious issues, such as:
- You won’t be able to target new search terms with consistency. As a result, you won’t be able to track new keywords and gain new relevant traffic.
- You will not be able to build new pages that you can link up to, and the number of links you have generated so far will go down gradually.
- You cannot capture new people and add them to the list of remarketing audiences as well as send any kind of push notifications.
- You won’t be able to build new content that can get a lot of recognition and share on social media channels.
- You cannot encourage a new audience to visit your website and check new content.
- As a result, your branded searches will be reducing and indicate to Google that the website is no longer offering useful elements.
Let me clear this up in easy words.
When you stop creating content and stop doing SEO, it would send a message to Google that the website is no longer been useful or active and hence, it would die a slow death within months.
Your competitors won’t stop- even surpasses you soon!
Now just because you have stopped doing SEO doesn’t mean that your competitors have also stopped.
Remember, they are still applying advanced methods in full swing.
And eventually, competitors who were on page two and working hard to gain success will be able to take over your top position and soon grab all your customers who have been praising you till to date.
This might take a few days or months, but it is going to happen one day when you stop doing SEO!
The reason is, SEO is a widespread practice and every small and large business wants to invest in it for exceptional results. So, when you continue doing SEO, you can learn new campaign methods and easily dominate your Search Engine ranking.
Now you shouldn’t be surprised to know that all the big competitors are keeping an eye on you and watching every new move you make; they are implementing all the innovative techniques to outperform you.
So, when you stop doing SEO, you are giving your competitors a chance to replace you and overtake your top ranking.
You won’t be able to track technical issues on the website
People that have the least knowledge about SEO must not understand things from a technical perspective, they won’t be able to understand how everything would be disturbed technically and can’t be fixed if you don’t watch over constantly.
In fact, I have never come across any website without a handful of technical issues that disturb the overall position of the website.
If you stop doing SEO and not monitoring all the technical issues of the site, the results will be:
- You will soon block the site with robots.txt.
- You will start generating duplicate content.
- You might push the development factors into the index.
With SEO being stopped, you cannot monitor anything or fix issues promptly, in fact, they would add up and you won’t be able to control.
Think of your website just like a beautiful garden that needs proper maintenance, or it would be overgrown with unnecessary things that disturb the overall look and performance.
Final thoughts- Why you should NEVER stop doing SEO?
Obviously, after knowing all the facts, you are not going to stop doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
If you are a business owner relying on SEO, you must understand that how amazing an asset it is that can improve your ranking and help you grow soon.
But unfortunately, when you stop doing that even for a month, you must face consequences! And that would be hard, believe me!
The ugly truth is, you cannot reverse the moment once your website has moved in the wrong direction.
So, in the end, I would only say that you should never have any excuse to stop doing SEO even if it’s not giving good results because things take time to grow.
But trust me, once you see the results, it’s hard for you to stop!
