Editorial Staff
You might now achieved rank 1 on the SERP for your most important keywords. Your position stand strongly and undefeated by all your competitors. But what happens if you stop doing SEO?
Can you take a break once you’ve reached the first spot on Google? What will happen if you do so? In this module, we’re going to address into these questions.
What Happens If You Stop SEO?
None of the SERP ranking stays forever on their current spot. The competition in the SERP is getting more intense day by day.
This means, when you’ve already achieved the first spot on Google for your most important keywords, it won’t stay there forever.
Just the same as your previous effort to reach the first spot on Google, your competitors are trying as hard as they can to get into the first spot.
You might be on the first spot currently, but if you’re pausing and stop doing SEO, your competitors metrics are getting better each day and one day will replace your spot.
Generally, the main impact of stop doing SEO is losing the position in SERP and leads to lose of traffic.
As the SEO practice is quite broad, we will breakdown the impact if you’re stop doing based on each of the SEO practices:
1. What Will Happen If You Stop Posting New Content?
Creating new content (can be either new pages or posts) is challenging, especially if you’re in certain industry niche.
For example, if your site is a general blog or E-commerce sites, the content ideas are endless. It might end differently if your site niche is too narrow and you’ve ran out of new ideas of new content.
When you stop creating new content, you’ll lose out the growth momentum.
The ideal SEO result should be increasing gradually over the time. Of course, you don’t want to get stuck and the worse case, your traffic is start declining.
2. When You Stop Updating
Focusing on new post can expand your audience and possible new traffic. However, you should also still need to pay attention on the existing pages that are already rank well in SERP.
If you stop updating, chance is your pages are starting to lose rank and traffic gradually.
For instance, let’s say you created a content back in 5 years ago. You’ll need to ensure that all the information are up to date to the most recent trend.
Not only content, you should also pay attention on your overall website.
Always improve your site by updating the internal links to the existing content whenever a new post is published, updating the dates, changing template, and so on.
Also, always keep up to date of the most recent Google’s algorithm update to keep on track what is the best practice for SEO.
3. What Happen If You Stop Doing Link Audit?
Link audit process involves monitoring new backlinks and keep it clean from all the toxic backlinks.
Toxic backlinks can come anytime from your competitors and it can harm your current ranking.
If you stop doing link audit, don’t be surprised if you find out a significant decline in your ranking and traffic.
Always remember to do link audit at least once a month to watch out from bad backlinks attack.
4. What Happen If You Don’t Watch For Technical Issue?
Technical SEO might look as one time off practice. But the truth it isn’t.
Whenever you install new plugin, adding new template and features to your website, your site is getting slower.
You might not notice it as the impact is actually compounded from time to time.
Same goes to the crawl error and robots.txt. Sometimes, there is something that cause new crawl error, blocking the robots.txt, and even 404 pages.
If you don’t pay attention on these technical issues, your ranking and traffic will start declining.
5. What Happen If You Stop Doing Link Building?
Most of the webmaster are easily satisfied when they see they have achieved spot one on Google for their important keywords.
According to our survey, 67% of the webmaster stop doing link building once they achieved their goals.
If you stop doing link building for your page SEO, you’re actually stop telling Google that your page is still credible and up to date.
A new backlink is a signal for Google to indicate that your page has been talked and mentioned by people on the internet.
When Google stop seeing new backlinks that are coming through your page, and meanwhile your competitor does, chance is your competitor will outrank your current position.
Why You Should Not Stop Doing SEO?
To conclude, here are the summary of what you could get if you stop doing SEO:
- Drop in ranking
- Traffic decline
- Your competitor will overtake your position
- You’ll lose the growth momentum
- You’ll lose tons of possible opportunity
We get it. Consistency is hard and sometimes pricy. We believe that every webmaster has their own reasons to stop doing SEO.
However, we strongly recommend you to not to.
The truth is gaining back the momentum is much harder when your site SEO is already in the negative direction.
Think it as the watering a plant for an example. When you stop watering your plant, part of the plant will stop growing and even ended up with withered leaves.
When you decided to get back on track, it will takes more time for the withered part of the plant to recover before it is start growing back.
Meanwhile, if you had been consistently watering it from the start, it might get you some fruits and seeds as the reward.
