Welcome back to another Wednesday Workshop from Happy Hao Car!

It is not uncommon for businesses to stop and start SEO; whether they are changing providers or going in a new direction. Unlike some other digital marketing tactics, the benefits of SEO can last longer than you might think. So this begs the question…why do I need to continue to invest in SEO?

If you absolutely need to stop or pause your SEO investment, the good news is that the benefits of a great SEO strategy will carry for some time after you stop investing. However, we don’t recommend shutting down your SEO efforts entirely as this can quickly cause some pretty negative effects on your site’s organic search visibility.

Today we’re going to discuss what happens if you stop doing SEO for your website.

Not creating fresh content that targets new or relevant keywords has some pretty serious ramifications, including reduced traffic and less search visibility for new queries.

Plus, you’ll no longer be generating content that produces new and relevant backlinks (which, as we know, is the most crucial local search ranking factor ).

Long story short, the less often you update your website content, the more the search engines think your site is no longer active; which of course will not help you earn or maintain search visibility and continued indexation.

But don’t forget; SEO is more than just onsite content updates.

Sometimes things just break for unknown reasons; so, if you don’t pay attention to technical issues on your site, you’re in for a world of trouble when it comes to SEO.

Common technical SEO issues include: increased 404 errors, incorrect robots.txt filing, canonicalization problems and much more.

As these issues start to add up, search engines will start to take notice; especially if you’re not staying up to speed with search development updates.

Finally, if you step away from SEO, you’re leaving all backlink curation and monitoring in the dust.

It seems like spammy link practices are always evolving and never ceasing.

If you don’t pay attention to your backlinks, you may be more susceptible to content scraping, malware attacks, and negative SEO from competitors.

While we don’t recommend excessive disavow file submission, ignoring these black hat link tactics entirely can really hurt you.

Again, we know that some clients will move on or change things up in terms of SEO strategy; but we recommend caution when considering alternatives.

It would be such a disappointment for us AND for you to lose all the progress made in your website’s search visibility.

That’s all the time we have left for today’s workshop.

As always, if you have questions or comments, leave ‘em down below and we’ll get back to you shortly.

We’ll see you next time with another Wednesday Workshop from Happy Hao Car!

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• AI Search Visitor Behavior
• AIO and GEO Aren’t Replacing SEO

Kelcey Drapp is an SEO Manager working at Happy Hao Car since 2015, and in the digital space for nearly a decade. Kelcey enjoys digging deep into SEO research to discover the 'why,' and helping clients realize their potential for success online. In addition to her work in local SEO, Kelcey also likes to volunteer her digital marketing skills for non-profits in need. When Kelcey is not working, she enjoys cooking, traveling, and spending time with her husband, son, & three dogs.

Join the discussion 2 Comments

• Rose Grants says: November 22, 2020 at 10:48 pm I did SEO for my new site for 7 months then I stopped for 2 months and began again. Will it have a very negative effect on my site SERP ? Reply Kelcey Drapp says: December 9, 2020 at 10:56 am Hey Rose, thanks for this question! You will very likely see some fluctuations, but I doubt it will have a really long term negative effect on your SERP visibility. There are a number of factors at play that can affect this as well, i.e. what time of year/what time in your personal marketing cycle did you stop, what was done previously compared to what is being done now that you’ve restarted, etc. A good measure would be to look into your Analytics reporting to compare the first 7 months before stopping, with the 7 months after restarting. This may show some good insight as to what the effect of the 2 months paused was. Hope this helps! Reply

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