Recouping Losses SEO
SEO Lesson Learnt the Hard Way
Once a business has achieved really high rankings (1st, 2nd and 3rd positions on Page One of Google for major and minor keywords) and has held these rankings for some years it is very easy to become complacent. But this complacency is very dangerous. The reason it is dangerous is because one believes that having achieved and retained high rankings there is little to no chance of losing those rankings. There is however and this can occur if a competitor is investing strongly in SEO and/or you invest less (or stop SEO investment altogether.
My experience has also been, that rankings when lost are much harder to reclaim than they are to maintain. Thus whilst it may be tempting to cut back on SEO once goals have been reached, it really is not advisable as it is too risky.
More often than not, the monthly investment in SEO is quite small in comparison to the increase in revenue and profit that a business obtains once the website traffic has hugely increased. Thus the cost of SEO as a form of marketing for a business is quite small and highly effective and the temptation to cut back should be avoided at all costs.
A very good example of just this type of mistake occurred with a computer repair business that I did extensive SEO for and who achieved fantastic high rankings for major keywords in their geographical area (Brisbane).
High Rankings Achieved
This business was ranking…
Position 1, Page 1 for computer repairs brisbane (1,000 searches a month in Brisbane on average).
Position 1, Page 1 for computer repairs (480 searches a month on average)
Position 1, Page 1 for laptop repairs brisbane (320 searches a month).
Position 1, Page 1 for mac repairs brisbane (260 searches a month)
Position 2, Page 1 for data recovery brisbane (210 searches a month)
These are just the major search terms, there were plenty more and website traffic was booming and as a consequence the business was booming with strong revenue and profit.
Then SEO was halted. The impact of this was not immediably obvious which helped with the complacency that led to the decision to halt SEO.
Decline in Rankings and Website Traffic
However, over time, rankings started to slip. This was further impacted when another business in the same market started to invest strongly in SEO. This meant that as my clien’t business was sliding down the SERPS the other computer repair business was moving up.
Website traffic started to decline. Fortunately for my client a strong customer base had been built during the ‘good times’ and repeat business helped to keep the actual revenue of the business fairly consistent even whilst rankings and traffic were falling.
This client’s business did not drop as quickly as the drop in rankings and traffic for a second reason as well. The business had achieved strong patronage in mac repairs by providing an excellent service at rates below what other Apple Repairers were charging. Thus whilst traffic did decline, there was a much higher conversion rate for the mac repair side of the business.
Although the revenue and profit of the client’s business did not decrease in line with the fall in website traffic, it still did not benefit from the increased growth that would have occurred (generagted by the above two factors) built ontop of the high rankings and high website traffic that was achieved and could have been maintained with ongoing SEO investment.
Re-Investment in SEO
Eventually the falling rankings and website traffic resulted in re-investing in SEO. For a period of 18 months two blogs were loaded each month and social media in terms of posts was re-introduced. Around three hours of backlinking was done each month, amongst other SEO work.
Finally the efforts paid off and rankings and traffic started to improve. As you can see from the graph below organic website traffic peaked at May 2015 and now three years later May 2018 the website has not recouped this high level of traffic. Fortunately after the lowest point of traffic in September 2011, organic traffic has improved and is now back to the level that it was in November 2015.
Hopefully in time rankings will continue to increase and traffic to continue to increase with ongoing SEO, but it is sad to realise just how much business was lost due to the decision to de-invest in SEO.
