The short answer is “No”. It often comes up that businesses want to take a break from SEO, this is never a good thing. First up SEO (search engine optimisation) isn’t a one-off product you can just buy once and be done with it, it’s an ongoing process, but I’m sure you already knew that.
What happens when you stop SEO?
The first thing that happens is the site falls into dormant state. This happens because content isn’t being created and/or isn’t being published properly. It says to Google (and other search engines) that your website isn’t active. From there if your site isn’t active it starts to drop down the rankings.
When you stop SEO you invariably stop posting content. You might focus on your social platforms but the website gets left behind.
- With no new content no pages can be linked to and your number of back links drops
- You stop targeting new search terms and keywords, which in turn means less traffic, which flows on to less email signups and less social media growth from your site.
Then we have the refreshing or updating of pages. You see we don’t always create new content. Sometimes we update current content which usually results in somewhere between a 10% to 30% increase in traffic. Why, because Google sees the new text, new layout, updated schema to name a few things, and wants to rank it higher.
So that’s just the basics of the content side of things. What about some of the more sinister practices you need to keep on top of.
Bad links, half the time you might not even know this has happened. but bots from less than trustworthy services might scrape your website content for inclusion in their search results or whatever and they keep your links in. The problem with this is that “Low Quality Links” as Google labels them can effect your search rankings.
Let’s not even get started on competitors trying to do negative SEO on your site, which seems to be happening more and more.
Duplicate content is another major issue. For one it is quite easy to create duplicate content on your own site and without the proper designation Google will read it as duplicate content which doesn’t have a positive effect on your search rankings. The more sinister version of this is another website had copied word for word the entire page or even just a paragraph which has a devastating effect on your search rankings.
Don’t stop your SEO!
It’s a much easier and a lot more beneficial to continue with SEO and build upon positive results. Once the negative momentum has started it takes a lot longer and lot more work to pull a site out of the depths of the Google algorithm.
So do yourself a favour and don’t stop your SEO.