Case Study – SEO Effect – The Impact of Halting SEO On Website Traffic

Impact on Website Traffic Caused by Stopping SEO

For various reasons, the main one being the frustration of the SEO effect which was slow growth in ranking and website traffic (a tough local market), a client of mine decided to stop investing in SEO in September 2016.

Whilst I completely understand the frustrations that can arise from slow growth in ranking (and hence traffic) that can occur in a highly competitive (SEO wise and Google wise) market, if a business truly wants to obtain the incredible benefits of ranking on page one in the top three positions it is purely a matter of time.  Time naturally means money and that can be a difficult business decision for a small business trying to get ahead.

However, let’s have a look at:-

1. the impacts of the SEO work that I did for this client; and let’s have a look at
2. the impact on website traffic after a period of not doing SEO.

SEO Effect of Work Done

This particular client had selected to make a small investment in SEO each month, paying a small monthly fee.  However, I still invested up and above time for this client and it did bring in results.  However the client in this instance wanted greater results but this was not possible within the time frame as his business was in a highly, highly competitive market.  In a less competitive market, his SEO investment would have brought greater results, but he was in an industry where may businesses had invested in SEO previous to him and were still ongoing.  This can be a very difficult situation for a small business to be in.

Website Traffic Over Time

I started SEO for this client in September 2015 with little to no website traffic.  You can see from the graph below that traffic increased rapidly in the initial months and then sort-of plateau after about 10 months.

You can also see from this graph that the traffic was just about all generated from organic traffic – that is from people finding the website on Google through keywords – the results of SEO.  Direct website traffic also includes a proportion of organic traffic but for simplistic sake I have only put in total traffic and organic traffic on the graph.  Thus the graph does under-represent the actual traffic that is generated from SEO – the SEO effect.

Although for this client SEO was halted at the end of September 2016 the website traffic continued to grow until it peaked in January 2017.  So the SEO effect – the website traffic continuing to grown for 4 months with no additional SEO work still occurred.  This is because of the SEO work that was done previously still impacting on ranking improvements.  There is always a delayed results to SEO work and this can be very clearly seen in this case study with growth occurred as a delayed impact of work previously done.

However this does not continue into infinity, eventually the impact of no further SEO work done for the website occurs.  The graph shows the rapid decline in website traffic that occurred for this business once this negative impact of no additional SEO happened.  The website traffic is now heading towards where it had been before the investment in SEO.

Case Study Results

The results of this case study illustrate so far two major facts:-

1. SEO does work – it does generate increasing amounts of traffic to a website over time.
2. Completely halting SEO will result in a decline in website traffic.

This does not mean that your SEO investment needs to make a major dent in your budget from now to eternity.  Once high rankings have been achieved it requires a lesser investment in SEO to keep them than it does to obtain them in the first place.  However, usually I find that once a business has achieved good rankings and hence more revenue, the investment in SEO is seen as a low cost in terms of the returns that it provides.

SEO Competition

Some businesses (as discussed previously) have a much larger upfront investment in SEO due to the high competition for their industry in Google as the SEO effect takes longer.  Others are much luckier.  At the end of the day though and for the foreseeable future for most businesses (particularly new businesses) an investment in SEO is essential even though for some the major gains are some years away.

Conclusion

However as you can see from the chart, even whilst this client did not achieve the first page ranking for his major keywords, there was still an SEO effect as his website traffic did increased.  This is achieved through targeting not only the major search terms but also smaller (long-tail) search terms.  The long-tail search terms generate less traffic but are often easier to achieve ranking for.  These thus can bring in some website traffic before the major traffic that would occur with page one ranking and position one to three on page one.

Through The Ranks

I am an independent SEO Consultant specialising in SEO for geographically based service businesses in Brisbane and Australia.  I offer affordable SEO packages and my work is effective, white hat and thorough.  If you would like me to help get your website moving through the ranks contact me on 0411 403 511.