Once your website starts ranking high in the Google search results for your target keywords, and the people who find your business online begin to convert into clients, it can be tempting to save some money every month by cancelling your SEO service.
After all, once the leads start flowing, they won’t stop, right?
Wrong!
SEO should be considered a continual process, which is actively maintained day after day, week after week, month after month.
If you stop working to keep your website at the top of Google, then sooner or later, as sure as night follows day, your rankings will fall and you’ll be back to square one!
Plus, even if you’re happy with the number of leads your website is producing at the moment, did you know that with a little more work it could easily generate you many more? Consider what these extra leads could mean for your business – perhaps they could allow you to expand your operations, take on new staff, turn a side hustle into a full-time job… or even pay for your own private island!
One day, perhaps…
So then, let’s take a closer look at just some of the reasons why it’s vital to continue investing in SEO once you start seeing results.
1) Website Pages Often Drop Out Of Google’s Index And Need To Be Resubmitted
As anyone who’s managed a large website will know, every now and again some of the pages on that website will drop out of Google’s index entirely, for what seems like no apparent reason.
After this happens, those pages won’t appear in Google’s search results at all, no matter how hard you look. This means the supply of leads and sales that these pages were generating for your business will all of a sudden stop completely… and this can happen at any time, seemingly at random.
The solution is simple enough – any pages that drop out of Google’s index need to be resubmitted to it via Google Search Console. But unless you have an SEO professional keeping a close eye on your website to spot when its pages drop out of Google’s index, and then taking action to get them back in as soon as possible, you risk having your best source of leads end overnight, with no idea of what’s gone wrong or how to fix it.
2) A Little More Work Can Mean A Lot More Leads
This study by Chitika found that:
- The #1 search result in Google gets 34% of the organic traffic
- The top 3 search results receive 63% of the organic traffic
- Improving from ranking position #2 to ranking position #1 will more than double your organic traffic
- The website ranking in position #1 will receive more traffic than the websites ranking between position #5 and position #20 put together
- Improving your ranking from position #11 to position #10 will increase website traffic by 143%
- Improving your ranking from position #8 to position #1 will increase your traffic by 1000%
Here’s what all this means – if your website is currently generating you leads by ranking somewhere on page one for certain keywords, with a little more work, you could supercharge the amount of new business you’re receiving simply by continuing with your SEO campaign until your site reaches the top few positions.
For instance, Chitika’s data shows that if a website goes from ranking in position #8 for a keyword to position #1, it will receive ten times the amount of traffic, and therefore likely generate ten times the amount of leads.
What would this mean for your business, and for your lifestyle?
However, this works the same way if your website rankings were to drop. Falling from position #1 to position #2 will cause your website traffic to drop by 50%, while crashing to position #8 will reduce traffic by 90%.
How would your business cope with such a harsh decline in leads and sales? By continuing with your SEO campaign even when things are going well, you’ll never have to find out.
3) Your Website May Not Deserve To Rank Highly In Future
In today’s SEO landscape, creating excellent quality content that online audiences will find genuinely useful, is vitally important.
Google has long since wised up to the kind of shady (but sometimes effective) tactics that less reputable SEO firms used to use to get websites which probably did not deserve to be there, to the top of the search results.
Nowadays, if you want your website to rank top of Google, it’s always worth asking yourself, does it really deserve to be there? Does the webpage you’re trying to rank have better, more useful, and more informative content than the webpages which currently rank highly for your target keywords?
If it doesn’t, then improving the page until it delivers what users are searching in Google for better than its competitors, should be the first priority.
Once that’s done, and your website is ranking at the top of Google just like it deserves to be, everything is done, right?
Well no, actually.
The problem is, if a keyword is valuable to you, it’s also valuable to others. And if your competitors decide to create even better content targeting that keyword, they could outrank you and benefit from the traffic you’re currently getting.
A good SEO provider will monitor your competitors’ activities and identify any content that might threaten your rankings. Next, they will enhance your content to ensure it stays ahead of the competition and maintains its position.
In addition, your competitors might all the while be improving their off-site SEO factors, such as increasing backlinks to their website and generating more social shares of their content.
In this case, a skilled SEO professional will notice when and how your competitors are making progress online, and will take steps to protect your rankings. They might even uncover the strategies your competitors are using to get the backlinks and social shares, and then replicate them for your benefit.
4) Ranking Factors Change Over Time
SEO is NOT a static discipline.
What works today might not work tomorrow, and what was effective yesterday could even harm your rankings today.
This is because Google frequently changes what it considers good SEO practice, and they’ve repeatedly made updates that, almost overnight, turn once-effective techniques into rank-killing liabilities.
Therefore, it’s crucial that either you or your SEO provider stay up-to-date with every change Google makes to its ranking algorithm. Because if you don’t, you’ll be left totally exposed to Google’s whims, and risk having your rankings crash every time they make an update.
This is NOT an idle threat, as the tens of thousands of businesses who have seen their online sales plummet as a result of Google’s Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, and Fred updates will testify.
A good SEO provider will be staying up to date with all major adjustments in Google’s algorithms – and will react quickly and decisively when they are introduced – to prevent their clients from experiencing a drop in rankings and the consequent decline in leads generated and sales made.
5) The SEO Industry Changes Quickly
Google aren’t the only company whose actions can change the SEO landscape in an instant.
Exciting new technologies and software tools are being developed and released all the time, with each of them offering SEO professionals fresh opportunities to increase productivity, boost efficiency, and maximise results.
For instance, AI tools like ChatGPT and others allow for the content creation process to operate on overdrive, with SEO professionals now able to publish SEO-optimised landing pages on client websites quicker, easier, and more regularly than ever before.
These ongoing explosions in productivity mean SEO progress can be made faster than seemed possible only a few short years ago, which is great news for anyone investing in a quality SEO service, but bad news for those who are not, as their competitors will have the chance to catch up, surpass, and charge ahead simply by hiring an SEO agency for themselves.
6) Your Website’s Topical Authority Will Suffer
Topical authority is an SEO strategy where a website establishes itself as the leading source on one or more subjects. By doing this, the website can outrank other, far larger competitors that have a more general focus.
To build topical authority, you will need to publish articles that cover all aspects of your website’s main industry. For example, if you want to rank for keywords that relate to renewable energy, writing a single article about solar panels won’t be enough to establish topical authority.
Why? Because renewable energy is a very broad topic, and a single article about solar panels won’t even begin to cover everything about it.
Instead, to build topical authority, you will need to publish many articles that cover all the main aspects of renewable energy, such as wind power, geothermal energy, hydropower, solar power, ocean energy, bioenergy, and more.
The importance of establishing topical authority on your website was further emphasised with the introduction of Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) ranking criteria in Google’s more recent ranking algorithm updates.
In a nutshell, E-E-A-T ranking factors require a website to demonstrate to Google – and to its audience – that the site is a legitimate, trusted, and highly knowledgeable source of information about its core subject. And if a website focuses on sensitive topics such as health or finances, establishing Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness is vital if you wish to rank high in the search results.
Similar to topical authority, the best way to establish E-E-A-T factors on your website is to regularly publish long, detailed articles that cover all aspects of your website’s core focus in-depth, while showing off the expertise and experience that your business has accumulated over time.
However, creating this type of content is a time-consuming, labour-intensive endeavour that most companies struggle to do. Unfortunately, this means their websites will be losing ground all the time to their competitors who are able to invest in this area, costing them valuable ranking positions and the leads and sales which result – a phenomenon that will be more apparent for websites focused on health, finance, and other sensitive topics.
Thankfully, by hiring an SEO company to create the content for them – even when their website is performing well – businesses can keep building their topical authority and E-E-A-T ranking factors on a day-to-day basis, ensuring they retain the edge over their competitors for the long-term.
7) You’ll Find It Harder To Rank New Pages In Future
Imagine your SEO campaign is a success. You’re ranking exactly where you want to be for a range of lucrative keywords and enjoying the benefits.
‘Job done,’ you think, and sack your SEO provider.
Later, you launch a new product or service on your website and want it to rank high in Google. No problem, you’ll just hire an SEO company again to handle it.
But here’s the thing…
During all the time you were without an SEO provider, no-one was building new backlinks to your website, improving your on-site SEO, getting social shares, or establishing topical authority.
Essentially, you’ve been losing ground to your competitors day after day…
Even if your existing rankings haven’t dropped yet (though they likely will have done), getting high rankings for any new pages on your website will be much harder. That’s because your competitors who kept up their SEO efforts will have gained an advantage, and it will take a lot of time, money, effort, and stress to catch and surpass them.
However, if you had kept your SEO provider all along, even when you thought you didn’t need them, you would instead be in an excellent position to quickly, easily, and cheaply rise up the rankings for the keywords targeted on your new website pages, thereby putting yourself in prime position to hoover up all the new leads and customers that your competitors would otherwise be getting.
Want to grow your business through successful long-term SEO strategies? Contact our expert team!
