When most business starts an SEO program, their primary goal develops – more organic traffic, high ranking, and increase in revenue.
But in today's search scenario, maintaining your visibility is equally important.
With the rise of AI-Interacted Search, AI interview, and zero-click result, is difficult to achieve organic growth.
About 60% google is finished without one click without discoveries – so where will the future growth come from?
The reality is that organic traffic will decline, without ongoing SEO efforts.
To survive, businesses will have to look not only as a growth engine, but also as a way to protect and maintain their current organic visibility.
This article makes the case-and provides examples of the real world-why should there be an important idea to protect and maintain traffic when evaluating the value of the SEO campaign.
Cost of inactivity
One of the greatest misconceptions in marketing is that organic visibility will remain stable without the ongoing SEO investment.
In fact, the opposite is true.
Neglecting SEO declines organic visibility, a tendency that has only intensified with recent developments.
It should not come as a surprise.
Think about regular dental checkups. No one expects to improve his teeth from a dentist. They go to prevent expensive and painful processes below the road.
The same principle applies to SEO – one ounce of prevention is worth one pound of treatment.
Refresh the old content, maintaining site health and ignoring functions such as building authority guarantees almost a decline in organic traffic.
Why?
Because the contestants will carry you forward, the algorithm will develop, the serPs will be more crowded with features, and the ranking will fall.
Do not just take my word for this.
Will Kichlo recently published an article depicting this concept.
Using real -world data from an unnamed ecommerce website, he said that business A can expect A 10-20% decline in organic visibility per year If they do nothing.
David Shapiro, VP of the media earned in Mindgruve, put it best: “Flat is new.”
If a business wait for a long time to invest in SEO – then only acting is already going on after the fall – the cost of recovery can be astronomical.
Worse than that, it may be impossible to restore a website for your previous performance.
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SEO may be defensive by nature
Another important factor to consider is that some aspects of the SEO are naturally defensive.
This is always disappointing when customers request an SEO launch to implement technical SEO reforms.
There may not be an average increase in work traffic or visibility, such as maintaining sitemaps or ensuring proper canonicalization.
For now, Google can still find and index without any problem.
But what about future dangers?
Visibility can change in an instant, causing significant damage.
If the sitemap is not updated correctly, Google can struggle to find new published pages, especially if they are not internally connected.
If the canonical tags are missing and the paid team has launched new UTM parameters, then your index can be filled with duplicate pages.
Both these landscapes have been with my customers despite prior warnings to address these issues.
Migration support is another prime example of technical SEO where development is not primary attention.
Many businesses try to migrate without SEO participation, often leading to disaster – a decline in traffic and visibility.
Important materials are lost, the pages are not properly redirected, or significant errors appear in the code.
Below is an example of a real world of a customer who came to us after neglecting SEO in his stay. The results were not beautiful.
It is not about development, but is to maintain visibility, which will never appear in the projection of development.
Good site is the ROI preventive to maintain health, and it is equally valuable.
Catch important errors
The SEO works with many different teams within an organization, such as content writers, PPC teams, UX designers and developers.
Each team has its own objectives, and they probably do not prioritize the site health and in the same way.
Therefore an important part of the SEO is ensuring that nothing has been applied that can damage the visibility of your website.
This may not look like a large danger, but it occurs all the time, especially in large, silent teams.
Consider this real -world example: A customer's development team launched a code update that accidentally does not reveal an entire section of their website.
Fortunately, the issue was caught and decided before significant damage. But what if it was not?
The problem could not be noticed for a long time, before they feel it, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars, they could be spent.
Catch this error alone for the entire SEO campaign.
Such examples are more often, cares for accepting it than most business authorities.
If these threats are not in your SEO strategy, then an important part of SEO's ROI has been ignored.
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Branded Fall Fighting
One of the most common scenarios I see with businesses seeking SEO agency is a slow, steady decline in branded traffic.
While SEO is not the best channel to recover branded traffic, it excels in running non-branded traffic to fill the difference.
This exact landscape was played with a customer last year.
Adding branded and non-branded numbers suggests that the total traffic is still down.
However, without implementing SEO recommendations to bring into non-branded traffic, the decline would have been very poor.
An executive reviewing overall numbers cannot be seen development, but a deep eye will recognize that the SEO has successfully reduced even more serious losses.
Do not sell the price of SEO short
The goal of this article is not to spread fear – it is to highlight reality.
Businesses and websites have to face many threats to their performance, from AI progress and SERP to competitive activity, branded decline and even internal mistakes.
The SEO, however, serves as an important defense against these negative forces.
This perspective can be a hard sales, so many SEO agencies leave it out of their pitches. After all, no business wants to pay a large amount to stay flat only.
But if there is an important tech uter, it is: SEO's position as a defensive strategy is necessary and will only be more relevant over time.
The SEO fully enhances growth, and it is important. However, if development is the only focus, the correct value of SEO is being sold low.
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