Сan You Stop Doing SEO? What will Happen to the Site
Stop optimizing - this thought, at least sometimes, but comes to the mind of the site owners. Especially - in times of crisis. Even more often there is a desire to stop the optimization for a while. For different reasons. Starting from simple laziness and ending with the desire to save on the salary of SEO staff.
But let's remember what does SEO mean? This is an activity to improve the position of the site in the issuance of the search engine. Obviously, stopping such activity will have a bad effect on the ranking of the site. And the deterioration will not happen immediately. So it won't be noticeable. And returning to the original positions will require additional time, money and effort.
I explain what happens to the site if:
Stop posting new content
What will be said next can be summarized in one sentence - don't ignore local SEO. Without new content on the site, the following negative factors are included:
- Stop targeting new words. This leads to a decrease in the list of keywords for which a given site is ranked and a reduction in traffic.
- The number of links to the site is reduced due to the lack of new publications that can be linked to.
- The flow of visitors is decreasing. Because of what, the growth of the remarketing audience, the base of e-mail addresses and the list for sending push notifications stops.
- Stops creating content that can be used to create content hubs (hub pages) - interconnected collections of content on a similar topic. Content hubs rank very well in search engines.
- Reduced content for distribution on social networks. Thus, reposts and traffic in social networks are generated worse and worse.
- It makes less and less sense for visitors to visit the site for new posts. This means that the number of search queries for your business is decreasing. And the number of requests is very important. After all, their number is an indicator of the quality of the site for Google.
In general, the cessation of loading content is a message to Google that the site's activity is falling and stagnation has begun.
Ignore technical problems and innovations
If you do not track technical problems and site failures, they begin to accumulate. An analogy with a garden or vegetable garden is appropriate here - with irregular care, they will begin to overgrow with weeds and suffer from pests. The harvest will be smaller, the quality of the fruit will be worse.
Ignoring technical problems can lead to the following consequences:
- Downgrading and blocking site content for search robots (for example, Googlebot) due to errors in the index file (robots.txt).
- The appearance of duplicate content. For example, this can happen if the site's CMS is configured incorrectly. Or because of a change in the structure of the site (introduction of an updated template with new URLs). Finally, when publishing pages with different text versions. Even a single duplication has a bad effect on promotion in search results. Search robots, having found duplicate content, will visit the site less. With a large number of duplicates, the search engine may generally exclude the site from the search results. Also, the robot can assign a duplicate page for delivery instead of the original one. Finally, there may be problems with the link profile. Some of the users may put a link not to the original, but to a useless duplicate.
- It is vital that the site takes into account new developments and requirements for usability. Websites that are outdated in terms of technology very quickly begin to yield to competitors. For example, now the requirements for multi-platform, download speed are very important. By the way, how is the situation with the introduction of AMP technology on your site?
Do not update posts and pages
The content update attracts a search robot that indexes the pages. Which, accordingly, speeds up the indexing of new pages. And since there is no update, then the search robot has nothing to do on your resource.
On the other hand, traffic to a correctly updated page often increases by 10-30%. And sometimes even more. When Google detects such a post, it ranks it better.
In the structure of the site, the reviews pages and blogs are most in need of updating.
The most interesting thing is that refreshing the page is a simple job. Here are some recommendations:
- do not update relatively recent posts. It is better to deal with those who are more than one year old;
- add a FAQ to the page;
- add or update links to other articles;
- update the facts mentioned in the text;
- update publication dates;
- add text. But remember - the addition should contain useful, interesting information;
- add infographics;
- change the page template. This is exactly the case when you can redesign website without losing SEO. Moreover, even improve it;
- republishing. Delete the old content and replace it with the new one. But leave the URL unchanged. Make sure the title and OpenGraph tags are up to date;
- a typical update error is to deliberately or unintentionally remove important, link-attracting parts of the text. Before editing a post, analyze the link profile. Determine where and how links to your site appear;
- and one more recommendation. Before you start updating, examine the first page in the SERP. Think about what you can do better than a competitor?
Don't follow bad links
It should be understood that the link profile is a very powerful promotion factor. And it requires constant supervision and control. If you let everything take its course, then the link profile of your site will turn into chaos, which brings a lot of problems.
And then do not ask: “Why is my website losing SEO?”.
In the most general form, the site should have a stable and continuous dynamics of building a link profile. Any strong deviations are perceived by search algorithms with great suspicion.
High-quality working backlinks from useful websites benefit your site as well. But if the link is from a hacked, sanctioned, or bad reputation site, then it poses a threat to your site and business.
And vice versa, if links from your site go to dubious, hacked or already “dead” resources, then nothing good will come of this situation either.
Therefore, you need to constantly check backlinks with special SEO tools. Figuratively speaking, weed regularly in your garden. Otherwise, weeds will quickly suffocate useful plants.
Allow content to be stolen
Set up a simple experiment. Copy a few sentences from posts on your site. Paste this block into Google (don't forget the quotes) and start searching. I am almost sure that there are a couple of resources with the same content. Even without a rewrite.
How does theft affect the victim?
- the number of transitions decreases. It's a shame when the plagiarist is higher in the search results than the real author;
- loss of reputation. The visitor will not understand who stole the content from whom. In this case, SEO marketing will not fulfill the tasks assigned to it. After all, what is SEO marketing? This is primarily to attract new customers and buyers from search engines to the site.
Here are a few tricks to combat content theft:
- rewrite content on your site. It's a shame, but you have to;
- write to an unscrupulous site with a request to remove stolen content;
- report your copyright infringement to Google. Google cannot block or remove a bad faith site. But it will remove it from the search results;
- contact the hosting company of the unscrupulous site for support. Sometimes it helps.
Conclusion: What is SEO - it's the lifeblood of a website
The sad truth is that it is very difficult to restore something that has been abandoned even for a short time. The site owner will have to fork out, and SEO specialists will work hard to get the resource back in good shape. Here again the analogy with the neglected garden suggests itself. It will take a lot of effort and time to revive it, as well as to restore the site.
Time is the most valuable resource for business today. Almost half of it is wasted on routine tasks. Your employees are constantly forced to perform monotonous tasks that are difficult to classify as important and specialized. You can leave everything as it is by hiring additional employees, or you can automate most of the business processes using the ApiX-Drive online connector to get rid of unnecessary time and money expenses once and for all. The choice is yours!