One of the hardest things to get my clients to fully embrace is that SEO is a long-term, ongoing process. It’s a marathon, not a sprint! You’re link building activities build upon themselves to help increase your brand presence online, your trust factor with the search engines and your overall online success. You shouldn’t quit your SEO activities just because it looks like your goals are being accomplished. It’s not unusual for a site to slip backwards once they stop their SEO. Just because you’ve achieved the ranking position you wanted, that doesn’t mean someone else can’t take it away from you! The best defense is a good offense and SEO is the best offense you have online.
I once had a client who wanted to give SEO a “try,” but wasn’t sure if they wanted to commit for the long haul. I understand that. If you’ve never done any kind of on-site optimization or link building before, seeing a full SEO plan laid out before you can be very intimidating. We agreed to do a dry run, so to speak, for three months. When the trial period was over, we’d discuss whether or not he would like to continue his SEO efforts.
The three month trial period went better than I could have hoped. His company worked in a small niche where most of his competition wasn’t doing too much in terms of SEO. Scenarios like that are great opportunities for companies to really own the best keywords and dominate the search results. After the three months he was ranking in the top positions for all his chosen keywords, his traffic was up and so were his sales! Everything he could have wanted to see the value of SEO was staring us in the face.
Know what his reaction was? “I think we’re good as is.”
I couldn’t believe it. He pulled the plug on the SEO strategy and walked away! I tried to explain to him that SEO requires consistent actions and a continuing approach, but he thought the three months worth of on-site optimization and link building where enough to carry him on.
SEO is not a set-it-and-forget-it tool. If you are seeing good results, that doesn’t mean you can call it a day and let it run itself. The Internet never ends. Every day there is more content being created than you could consume if you spent the rest of your lifetime trying to do so. That means that there is an unbelievably large amount of clutter that you have to make your brand stand out amongst. If you don’t have the determination to settle down and strap in for the long haul, you’ll never get the most out of your SEO and you long-term success could suffer because of it.
