The Dojo

So you’ve invested heavily in your SEO – you’ve optimized all of your content, got some good links pointing to your site and now you’re reaping the rewards of a job well done. Now that you’re ranking well, it’s time to give the obsessive link building a break, right? Well…

If you are in an industry that is in any way competitive online, it’s not going to be long before somebody notices that they aren’t ranking as well as they used to…and if they’re savvy, you can count on them doing something about it.

What follows is a prime example of a company that rested on their laurels:

The graphics above show the timeline of a temporary SEO campaign – fast results, big gains, and….a massive traffic drop-off 6 months later.

Once we’d done some initial work on improving this client’s ranking for a very competitive keyword (roughly equivalent to “real estate” or “home loans” in terms of difficulty) from 200+ to 4th, the client decided that they were happy to coast on this win, without thought to defending (or improving) what they had established. Sure enough, their site eventually slid outside the top ten – and naturally, traffic for that keyword dried up as well.

To be fair, this company was in an extremely competitive niche – any weaknesses in your SEO strategy (such as the absence of one) are going to be pounced upon and exploited within a market that fierce – so unless you’re in finance or another equally competitive market, you probably wouldn’t experience a decline as rapid as the one above.

I’d also like to make a secondary point that relates to the above – check out the graph below:

This graph gives a rough approximation as to how much traffic you should expect from each position in the top 10. As you can see, 1st position gets the lion’s share of traffic. So if you’re at 4th or 5th position for your primary keyword, know that you could (at the very least) double those results if you were 1st. This is the case we make for continuing with SEO even when you’re 1st – even slipping to 2nd position could see you getting half the traffic you used to get for that keyword.

The more businesses become aware of SEO, the more competitors you are going to have and the more important it is to have an active SEO strategy.

SEO improvement revolves heavily around attracting and developing great links from other websites. This process is by nature time consuming and thus SEO is as much a matter of time as it is money.

Consider the following (non technical & detail stripped) example:

Your company stops link development efforts for 3 months, whilst a competitor continues at a rate of 5 links per month. After three months it becomes evident that rankings have dropped, traffic is down and enquiries have dried up. Now running in the financial red, your company tries to recover – but because of the reduced revenue, an effort of 7 links per month is the largest investment possible. At this rate it will take 8 months from the point at which you re-engaged your SEO strategy to catch your competitors link building profile.

In Conclusion:

• SEO is a long term investment in non paid traffic. If it is profitable, it’s always best to fiercely maintain, defend and improve upon organic rankings.
• Businesses who choose to continue SEO will defend their rankings and distance themselves from their competitors.
• Business who choose to stop SEO may be left behind, making recovery difficult.

What Next?

Discuss your strategy with a Sumo SEO specialist.

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