In a perfect world, your team would tackle every marketing channel effectively, but we all have to make choices about where to spend time and budget and SEO isn’t always the top choice. Today we’re discussing the common outcomes of ignoring SEO.
SEO takes time and doesn’t provide instant results, but the SEO optimization you performed last month and last year will create a slow and steady increase in your rankings and traffic, leading to growth. However, the inverse of that effect is true as well. If you haven’t worked on your SEO last month or last year, the traffic you’re missing compounds over time. While your competitors build domain authority and improve their rankings, you fall further behind. What starts as a small gap becomes a chasm that requires significantly more investment later on.
One sign of neglected SEO is shallow rankings. A site might have a large number of total rankings, but those rankings can be ineffective if you aren’t ranking for the right kind of keywords. To use an (anonymized) example from a recent project, an organization had 150 page one rankings. That sounds good until you start to break down the keywords.
First, they rank for branded keywords – which is great – but largely a function of a unique brand name, not a function of great SEO on the website.
Second, they rank for a few dozen keywords which have nothing to do with their products, for example:
cheetah sleeping in grass
do hummingbirds eat bugs
all about monarch butterflies
These rankings are coming from some lovely nature photography on the site, but they aren’t going to lead anyone to buy products.
Lastly, they do rank for some non-branded relevant keywords, but when we break down page one rankings (which sounds impressive), here is what the numbers show:
44% Branded Keywords
33% Irrelevant Keywords
23% Non-Branded Keywords
Those non-branded keywords are the most likely to drive new business, and it’s less than a quarter of that page one total.
While they slept on their SEO potential their competitors were growing. Think about SEO as an investment. If you add money to a savings account, you’ll earn interest…say 4%. If you don’t add anything to that account, you earn 4% of 0. Along with the traffic and conversions your competitor is earning, they are also earning authority. Google rewards websites that perform well. If a site continually holds the interest of users, it is likely to continue being rewarded by Google.
As those trusted websites continue to grow, they will gain market share. Competitors don’t just steal potential customers; they establish themselves as industry leaders in the eyes of both search engines and users. This perception becomes self-reinforcing as more people link to and reference their content. Remember, getting a competitor’s customer to switch is harder than getting a new customer to choose your products.
With lower amounts of organic traffic from SEO, many businesses turn to paid advertising as their primary source of website visitors. While paid ads can be effective, this dependency creates long term problems:
As more businesses compete for the same ad space, costs increase. What once cost $2 per click might now cost $5 (for example), dramatically impacting your marketing budget.
The moment you stop paying for ads, your traffic disappears. Unlike SEO, which can continue driving traffic for months or years after implementation, paid advertising is only valuable if you continue buying it.
Most users skip paid ads entirely, preferring to click on organic search results. Studies show that organic results receive 20 times more clicks than paid ads, meaning you’re missing out on a significant portion of potential visitors.
Time to Think About SEO?
The good news is that you can start addressing these issues immediately. Begin with fundamental SEO practices like keyword research, on-site optimization, and content creation. Even small improvements can yield significant results over time.
If you’re not sure where your SEO stands today, get in touch. Research is the first step to SEO success and you’ll know exactly where you stand before you decide where to invest. SEO doesn’t get better if you ignore it, but the process of getting started might be easier than you think.