What happens if you stop doing SEO?

When companies realize the importance of natural referencing, they call upon professionals for a punctual SEO service, often for the creation of a site. Some believe that optimizing your site once is enough, and that not dealing with SEO will not cause any problems.

You can imagine, it’s not that simple!

Here’s what will happen if you stop dealing with SEO on your website.

If you stop posting content properly

When you stop publishing content, the following happens:

• You no longer target new topics and keywords constantly . This puts you on fewer requests and brings you less new traffic.
• You no longer create new pages that can improve internal networking , and the number of links decreases.
• You no longer capture new visitors to add to your remarketing audiences , email lists, and notification lists.
• You no longer generate content that can be used to create hub pages , which are “master” pages that link all pages of the same subject. These are often pages that position themselves very well.
• You no longer create content that can be shared on social networks , which can bring awareness and traffic.
• You no longer encourage your visitors to return to your site to discover new articles . This reduces searches related to your brand, a quality indicator for Google.

Above all, if you stop creating content, you tell Google that your site is no longer as active as it used to be and you start to sign the death of your site.

If you don’t watch for technical errors

People who do not have web experience often do not understand that technical problems can arise out of nowhere, for no real reason. It is impossible that a site never has SEO problems, even on perfectly optimized sites upstream.

If you do not control the technical aspects of your site, you will probably encounter one of the following errors:

• You will end up blocking your site with the robots.txt file.
• You will generate duplicate content.
• You will accidentally publish the development version of your site.
• You will miss the errors of structured data, HTML content (hreflang, canonical, metas…)

When you do not monitor the technical part of your site, especially in SEO, technical errors will start to multiply. Think of your site as a garden: it needs regular maintenance, otherwise weeds will proliferate and your crops will die.

It is also essential to keep your site technically up to date, to monitor essential trends such as mobile indexing, loading speed, AMP pages, etc.

If you stop updating your pages

When you “refresh your pages” correctly, traffic typically increases by 10-30% , sometimes more. The main reason is that Google notices the new content and the value it brings, which usually means better positioning.

Here are the different ways to refresh your pages:

• Add FAQs
• Add links to other articles
• Update facts and dates
• Extend the text
• Add structured data
• Change the template
• Add videos or images

The most important thing to do when updating a page is to verify that it matches the search intent and that the page is better than the first result of that search.

Not updating its content therefore implies that your content will not be reviewed by Google , and that it may therefore fall into oblivion, or be overtaken by your competitors if you were well positioned. Ultimately all these pages not updated and especially the “out of date”, if they become too numerous, can penalize your entire site …

If you stop creating new pages

Creating new pages can be difficult for some sites, whose activity is limited to fixed products or services, rarely updated.

As with blog posts, if you stop creating new pages, you lose opportunities for new keywords .

So remember to create pages regularly, targeting new terms and organizing them by segment. Above all, create them for SEO, but don’t hesitate to make them landing pages for your campaigns .

As your site grows, consider creating more landing pages targeting specific keywords and audiences . Without abusing it, of course, it is necessary that all your pages have a separate utility with unique content .

If you stop following the wrong links

By stopping SEO, you are taking the risk that your backlinks profile will get out of control. That is to say that you will receive inappropriate return links, for example spam, forgotten paid links, artificial links and other types of links penalizing your SEO , without being able to disown them and therefore prevent polluting your pagerank.

By not monitoring your links, you will not see:

• Sites scraping yours with links to your site.
• Google alerts of sites hacked by malware .
• Competitors trying to do negative SEO on your site.

Google advises to disavow that in case of manual action, but it is better to get ahead and monitor its back links regularly. If you don’t update your disapproval list more than once a year, you are putting your site at risk . Some very competitive sites even need to be checked more regularly.

If you stop monitoring your stolen content

To give you an idea of ​​the importance of monitoring its content:

• Go to the most important page on your site.
• Copy a paragraph of at least 2-3 sentences.
• Paste this text with quotes in the Google search bar.

It’s a safe bet that you will see other sites than yours in the search results. Some may have even stolen more content from your site.

Imagine the impact it could have if this phenomenon occurs for many other pages on your site. Often times we find fully duplicated websites, stolen key pages or individual sections of a recovered page.

Here’s what to do when you find stolen content :

Rewrite the content of your site

• Ask the other site to remove it, first by email or phone.
• Send a registered with acknowledgment of receipt , listing everything that has been stolen.
• Take legal action after making a bailiff’s report proving the anteriority of the publication of your content.
• Sometimes it is possible to ask the host of the site to completely remove the site in question .

If you do not check and do not take these actions in case of content theft, this can have an extremely negative effect on your positioning. Sometimes the negative effects of duplicate content take a long time to correct.

You know that you should not stop your efforts in SEO. If you read this article, you will surely know how powerful it is to help your business grow if used regularly and consistently.

You will therefore understand that you must perpetually create content , update the existing , monitor the various axes mentioned (technique, links, stolen content …). As in many areas, consistency is essential in SEO.

Do not wait to have penalties or lose positioning to act!