Traffic generation and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are easily the most written-about topics in the internet marketing world. A simple Google search will verify just how hot these topics are.
While these topics are very relevant, being that SEO and traffic generation are crucial to running a lucrative business online, an often neglected aspect of the big picture is the sustenance of these activities.
You have done your SEO right, gotten to the coveted number spot of Google and now pulling in massive traffic. Congrats! What next?
Do you stop all SEO activities and keep counting your new-found SEO-given riches till eternity? Will Google continue to give you all that rank love?
While we all wish that the story could go that way, sadly it doesn’t. To continue enjoying the benefits of SEO, you will need to put a continuous effort into organic SEO activities for better web presence.
It takes remarkable efforts to get to the top of Google page 1. Equally, it requires good ongoing effort to maintain that spot.
Listed below are the top 5 reasons to work on organic SEO activities continuously.
Reasons to Continuously Engage in Organic SEO Activities
- Changes to Search Engine Algorithm: Search engines like Google keep making regular changes to how they evaluate and choose to rank websites on their search result pages. They make these updates to combat blackhat SEO practises and serve users with relevant and high-quality pages in their Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, etc. are some of the popular algorithm updates that Google has rolled out over the years.
These updates came with drastic changes to the signals used to rank websites, and thousands of websites got affected. Lots of sites tanked in the SERPs.
The image shows how a website lost over 90% of its traffic to a single algorithm update:
Source: Neil Patel
When updates like these come, they have the potential to affect your website negatively. For this reason, it is essential to continuously engage in and refine your organic SEO strategy to remain compliant with the latest SEO trends. Doing so will help you maintain your search rankings.
- Your Competitors are Not Sleeping: Sites ranking at the very top of Google page 1 tend to get the highest Click-Through Rates (CTR) from searches; hence, most of the traffic benefits.
The graph below from a Moz study shows how the CTR fades as you go from the top to Google SERPs to the bottom:
Source: Moz
The graph above is a clear indication that most of the juice lives at the very top of the SERPs. Naturally, hundreds of thousands of websites are actively pushing to take those juicy spots, and a good fraction of that crowd are direct competitors in your niche.
These competitors of yours are actively designing and executing SEO campaigns, trying to snag that number one spot in Google. This implies you have to stay on your feet if you want to retain your SEO rankings.
- Changes in Search Behavior: Just as search engine algorithms evolve with time, search engine users also continuously make changes to their search behaviour.
A keyword that was relevant, say five years ago, will very likely not have the same popularity and effectiveness presently. Users change the combination of keywords they use over time.
For example, using Google Trends to check the search popularity of the term “how to fix a bike” over two years (2017 to 2019) returns the graph below:
As you can see, while the term had search popularity of “100” back in 2017, in 2019, that number has drastically fallen to below “25”. This implies that if you were ranking for that term back in 2017, in 2019, you’d have theoretically lost 75% of the search traffic coming to your site from that keyword.
This indicates that if you are ranking for old terms, you will get left behind. Your competitors snatch up newer and more relevant keywords, kicking dust in your face.
To avoid this from happening, you need to constantly research current keyword trends to remain relevant and afloat (SEO wise) in your marketplace.
- Changes in Your Business or Company: As a result of the online marketplace evolving with each passing year, there are going to be similar changes in your business niche, which will lead to corresponding adjustments in your business operations, products and services.
With every change that occurs in your company, you’d need to reflect it in your existing SEO strategy. This will mean coming up with new keywords and content to cater to the adjustments.
- Continuous SEO Maintains Site Ranking and Establishes Your Site Authority: A study found on SEO Roundtable website references research carried out by an SEO company to show the adverse effects of not actively working on your SEO.
In the experiment, a small sample of 10 business websites was observed. In group A, five companies sustained their organic SEO activities, while in group B, the other half neglected SEO after rising to the top of SERPs.
Here is an image that showed how those sites fared over time in terms of Google search rankings:
Source: SEO Roundtable.
As you can see, the websites that failed to engage in continuous SEO activities experienced a drop in rankings by up to 30%.
On the flip side, you can see that the websites that sustained their SEO efforts experienced growth by up to 18%.
This shows that sustaining your SEO efforts after getting to the top helps you further increase growth and establish your authority.
Conclusion
The importance of engaging in continuous organic SEO activities cannot be overemphasized.
With the ever-changing nature of Google algorithm, combined with the other factors mentioned in this article, maintaining good standing in the SERPs can’t be achieved if you rest on your SEO oars.
You need to continuously work on your SEO to stay afloat. Some of the ways of doing these are to continually crank out top quality content, monitoring your competition and outdoing them and working on your website user experience.
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