What Happens If You Stop Doing SEO?
There are rumours that if you stop managing SEO, your website will reach rock bottom of the search results page. However, there are even more rumours that website visibility is bound to increase over time. Well, there is a grain of truth in both opinions, but the whole truth lies somewhere in the middle.
First of all, don’t forget that SEO is just one among many online marketing tools such as contextual advertising, SMM, SERM, blogging, pricing, emailing and so on. Each online business uses the most efficient tools. SEO is the best way for most businesses to attract customers through search engines.
Let’s consider some common situations when SEO is used or isn’t used
- The website isn’t optimized at all, but some other online marketing tools (such as pricing, content creation, contextual advertising, SMM ) are used. This is one of the traditional patterns used by online businesses. When this is the case, website visibility in search engine page rankings will be improving slowly because the basis of any online promotion is high-quality useful content and traffic. If search engines identify the website as developing, they will place it higher. Needless to say, the pace of such growth will be really slow because even high-quality content has to be put in properly, tags have to be added, in other words, it has to be optimized and that’s what SEO does.
- The website isn’t optimized at all, no online marketing tools are used. What is there to say? No one will ever see this site except for a casual spammer who might pop in once in a blue moon.
- The website is optimized well and ranks in the top. If you stop doing SEO or developing your resource in any other way, the rankings will drop. Why? Because your competitors are on the alert. Even if your ranking is high today, tomorrow somebody else’s ranking will be higher. Search algorithms are constantly changing, your competitors’ sites are improving so you won’t rank high forever.
- The website is optimized a bit, but it’s never ranked in the top. Roughly speaking, if the site hasn’t been optimized properly, the chances to rank high without further optimization are next to nothing. If we speak about a competitive ecommerce business niche, there are usually a hundred well-optimized websites, so an under-optimized one will always be in the sidelines.
Conclusions
SEO is a powerful online marketing tool so it would be a misstep not to use it because the majority of potential clients come from search engines. If you stop doing SEO or developing your site in any other way, the acquired ranking positions will start dropping slowly. Optimization is something you should do on a regular basis, so either study up on SEO by yourself or seek professional advice.