Search Engine Optimization (SEO): What is SEO and what happens when you stop SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most critical digital marketing strategies that all companies from the local store to international companies should be implementing, but most business owners do not understand SEO or its value.
As a Denver SEO company, we understand that business owners do not find the overarching value in organic SEO, but it is a marathon, not a sprint. A company that implements organic SEO over time will outperform its competition and here is how.
What is SEO?
A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy has several parts. Two of those are on-page and off-page SEO strategies that are set in place to help a website rank organically in search engines such as Bing and Google. What does it mean to grow ‘organically’?
We are selling organic products over here! Organic SEO footprints are grown by on-page and off-page technical SEO strategies such as keyword research, blogging, backlinking and so many other strategies in place. The main notion to understand is that organic SEO does not use any type of paid advertising. That is an entirely different strategy.
Companies often want to forgo the organic SEO strategies because it takes some time to gain traction inside search engines; while on the other hand, the paid search garners quick leads but at the end of the day those quick gains will not help over time.
Organic SEO allows for a company to continuously rank for keywords and phrases that their target audience is typing into search engines. Yes, it is great to run a paid ad and get a lead, but what about ranking for 10 to 100 keywords and getting leads from 20 of those keywords?
Makes more sense over time, right?
How does SEO work?
A Denver SEO company researches, analyzes and strategizes to understand a company’s industry and target audience. What are the search phrases that your target audience would be searching for?
A great example is an investment banking company that is looking to increase its brand awareness, SEO footprint and eventually bring in sales and leads. The very first step in this process is for the SEO experts to ask numerous questions, even repetitive ones to understand the entire industry and target audience. Without a basic understanding of the target audience, it can bring in leads, but not the qualified ones the company is searching for.
A company is searching for a trusted investment banker, what will they search? Depending on the services that they are searching for it can range from ‘capital raising near me’ to ‘investment banking Denver’.
The importance
Ahrefs conducted a massive research study for everyone so we could save time writing this blog, and the findings are not shocking to our experts, but it might be to others. Over 90 percent of content that is published on websites never gets crawled by any search engine.
Are you currently publishing blogs without SEO research or a website that is not optimized? Do you want to be part of the 10 percent that is getting website traffic? A company has to implement SEO at the end of the day. Yes, all other strategies are important such as paid search and social media marketing, but Google does not take that into consideration when ranking websites.
This is a great start to the process! You are creating blogs and publishing content, but without SEO strategies, it is all in the air on how it will work. What blogs or pages are bringing in the most traffic? Should you optimize those pages?
As a company, you implemented SEO for months and months, but recently cut the budget for SEO. What will happen now?
Cutting the SEO budget
As soon as a company stops SEO, our Denver SEO company notices immediately that their rankings decrease and website traffic starts to drop. The keywords that have been ranking for a considerable amount of time stay in their spot for months, but those new keywords that have been garnered are typically gone in weeks.
In the SEO world, we call that a flatline. Because the organic SEO heartbeat has dropped. We talk about the “SEO heartbeat”, this means you want an up and down with the low points consistently trending upwards.
Here is a great example of a client who stopped all SEO strategies for a couple of months before implementing the budget again.
Woah, check out that downward spike. Luckily, the organic website traffic search has increased over time, but still is not at what it was. Our Denver SEO company shows this as an example to make sure to NEVER cut the SEO budget. As we spoke about before, the top keywords that our experts got ranking are still ranking, but other keywords are coming in and out.
This hurts visibility, ranking, any credibility with search engines, leads and even more. Don’t stop SEO or cut the budget because it seems like a waste of time and money, because at the end of the day, it is a business investment that will pay for itself.