With the cost of living continually rising over the last few years, it makes sense for business owners to review their expenses and assess where they can cut back on costs.
As an SEO agency owner, I have been asked several times by clients’ whether they can pause their SEO, to save some money when things are quiet, or on the flipside, super busy. In the lead up to Christmas, we have already had 3 SEO clients reach out to enquire about pausing their campaigns temporarily during the holiday season.
Which led me to sit down and write this blog post (ironically instead of starting to plan our work Christmas party!).
Is Pausing My SEO Campaign a Good Move?
The short answer is no.
If you’re serious about the ongoing success of your brand, and if an online presence is a crucial part of that, then you should be investing in SEO 12-months of the year. According to Forbes, 71% of businesses now have a website, and 27% of all business activity is conducted online. So chances are your online presence IS crucial.
Thus, SEO needs to be a continuous process, regardless of whether it’s peak season for your industry (and you’re busy enough), a slow period (and you don’t need leads) or even if you’re going away and closing the doors for a few weeks.
SEO is an ongoing process
There are a range of tasks involved in an effective SEO strategy. All of these work together to build up momentum, helping increase both your websites’ relevance and authority, in Google’s eyes. Stopping these tasks for any length of time will hamper your momentum, which will see your rankings stagnate, or in many cases go backwards.
Search engines are regularly updating their algorithms to improve user experience. This causes volatility in the search results, and often requires refining your SEO strategies in response, to ensure your rankings are maximised.
Pausing an SEO campaign means you will no longer have an expert team monitoring Google’s algorithm changes, and no longer making the necessary tweaks and adjustments to ensure your website stays prominent in search.
SEO work takes time to have an effect
When SEO work is performed, it doesn’t have an instantaneous effect.
Whether you’re building new links to the website, making technical improvements, or adding new content, it takes time for these changes to get crawled, and then indexed in Google.
In fact it can take a couple of months for actions made today to be felt across the rankings. So, if a client was to “pause” their SEO campaign for December and January, this lack of inactivity would likely start to be felt a couple of months later.
Hence, a drop off in rankings and overall visibility would be seen in February, which in most cases is exactly the time a client wants to start generating more leads again.
The momentum lost from 2 months of complete inactivity would not only see ranking drops at exactly the time you want to be prominent again, but would likely take twice as long (4 months or more) to make up for the time paused and get back to where you want to be.
The short-term savings from stopping SEO will be far smaller than the long term gains you will lose.
Content should be a year-round priority
We’ve all heard the phrase “content is king”. This applies to SEO ten-fold, and Google is placing more importance on regular high-quality, unique content that places a person or brand as an expert in their industry.
A continuous SEO campaign allows the resources to produce regular articles for your website, engaging your audience and providing a signal to Google that will help your search presence.
This content helps the SEO by:
- Creating new fresh content
- Allows more internal linking opportunities to your target pages
- Helps with topical authority
- Increases ‘time on site’ for users
- Results in more indexed pages
- Provides more content to share on social media
Pausing an SEO campaign means a gap in your data
Most SEO agencies will be providing regular reports and have software that collates data across a range of metrics 24/7. When an SEO campaign is paused, the software will also be switched off. This is because SEO software can be quite costly, so if a client isn’t paying for the SEO, their website won’t get access to the software.
This will leave a gap in your campaign data moving forward, such as keyword ranking movements, and a range of other metrics.
In some cases, SEO software doesn’t allow you to pause a campaign, and only delete them. In this situation, a client pausing a campaign wouldn’t just have a gap in data, but lose a lot of the historical metrics.
An SEO agency may also charge a “reactivation” fee to restart the campaign. This is quite common because the team will need to re-setup an account on the SEO software (if pausing isn’t an option), carefully review the impact of any algorithm changes over the paused period, and rework the strategy in order to try and minimise any negative impacts the downtime has caused.
SEO is a bit like going to the gym. If you stop for a few months, you will start to see a bit of a decline in your strength. But it’s when you get back into it, you realise how much harder you have to work to get back to where you want to be.
Put in the work all year round and you will reap the benefits.
