Question: Can I Do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Just For a Short Time and Keep My Ranking In The Long-Term?

If I have SEO work carried out now do I have to keep going or can I stop as soon as I have the rankings I want?

Deeho Says:

Good question. In some instances, you can stop and your rankings won’t move very much, but in competitive niches, where many of your competitors are also working on their SEO, you will get left behind as they continue to add quality links pointing at their sites.

Their ongoing SEO strategy will out rank yours.

In the short term you might not notice much difference, but over time you will fall further behind in terms of the links you have and more and more competitor sites will out rank you.

It is a better strategy to get to the top in the shortest time frame possible by investing in SEO and then you can cut back on link building to a maintenance level adding just a few quality links each month.

As a strategy this is preferable to a stop start technique which sends negative signals to Google that people have stopped linking to your site, which in turn is a strong indicator that your content isn’t as good as it used to be.

Additional Reading:

What is SEO?