As a business owner or marketing manager you have to watch expenses. At some point you probably look at the balance sheet and ask yourself, ‘Do I really need all these services? Are they worth the money?’ Maybe you’ve even thought, ‘What if we fire our Colorado SEO firm? Couldn’t we just put that cost in the bank?’
Digital marketing can be tempting to cut from the budget because it can seem invisible. Yes, you’re getting sales from your SEO effort, but no customer is adding the phrase, ‘I’m buying this product thanks to organic rankings in Google’ when they check out. It’s easy to think of sales as a number that grows and shrinks on its own, rather than the product of a long term marketing effort.
What Happens If You Stop SEO Altogether?
The key to answering this question lies in another question, ‘How valuable is your SEO effort?’ The simplest way to arrive at that valuation is to compare the before and after.
If your SEO collaboration rocketed you to page one and is very valuable, you’re likely to see a sharp decline once you stop. If your SEO results poked along from month to month, you may not see much of a change when you pull the plug.
Here are some results from a company that done really well with Organic rankings and traffic but stopped its SEO effort in April of last year. Just prior to pausing all SEO efforts, the website had 107 page one rankings and 895 ranking keywords overall.
By the end of that year, overall rankings were down 61% and page one rakings were down 40%. What did this mean for traffic and revenue? Both dropped by more than half over the next eight months.
Why Would They Cut SEO?
In this case, their SEO effort was bringing in a substantial amount of traffic, but they had lost so much business to competitors over time that the revenue created didn’t outweigh the cost of creating it. In this case it made sense for them to cut ties with their SEO effort and create sales elsewhere.
Organizations need to make smart choices about how and where to invest their marketing dollars. In this case, pausing their SEO effort made sense although in the long term they’ll want to make sure this loss of traffic doesn’t lead to a cascading decline in traffic.
All strategies should be on the table until they are proven to succeed or fail. Sometimes a tactic that was valuable in the past isn’t the right choice for the future.