When most businesses start an SEO program, their primary goal is growth – more organic traffic, higher rankings, and increased revenue.
But in today’s search landscape, maintaining your visibility is just as important.
With the rise of AI-driven search, AI Overviews, and zero-click results, organic growth is harder to achieve.
Nearly 60% of Google searches end without a click – so where will future growth come from?
The reality is that without ongoing SEO efforts, organic traffic will decline.
To survive, businesses must see SEO not just as a growth engine, but as a way to protect and maintain their existing organic visibility.
This article makes the case – and provides real-world examples – for why defending and maintaining traffic must be a key consideration when evaluating the value of an SEO campaign.
The cost of inaction
One of the biggest misconceptions in marketing is the belief that organic visibility will remain steady without ongoing SEO investment.
In reality, the opposite is true.
Neglecting SEO leads to declining organic visibility, a trend that has only accelerated with recent developments.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Think of regular dental checkups. No one visits the dentist expecting their teeth to improve. They go to prevent costly and painful procedures down the road.
The same principle applies to SEO – an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Ignoring tasks like refreshing old content, maintaining site health, and building authority almost guarantees a drop in organic traffic.
Why?
Because competitors will outpace you, algorithms will evolve, SERPs will become more crowded with features, and rankings will decline.
Don’t just take my word for it.
Will Critchlow recently published an article illustrating this concept.
Using real-world data from an unnamed ecommerce website, he modeled that businesses can expect a 10-20% decline in organic visibility per year if they do nothing.
David Shapiro, VP of earned media at Mindgruve, put it best: “Flat is the new up.”
If a business waits too long to invest in SEO – only acting after a decline is already underway – the costs of recovery can be astronomical.
Worse yet, restoring a website to its previous performance may be impossible.
Dig deeper: 7 proven methods to explain the value of SEO
SEO can be defensive by nature
Another important factor to consider is that some aspects of SEO are inherently defensive.
It’s always frustrating when clients request an SEO projection to justify implementing technical SEO improvements.
Tasks like maintaining sitemaps or ensuring proper canonicalization may not lead to immediate, measurable increases in traffic or visibility.
For now, Google may still find and index your site without issue.
But what about future threats?
Visibility can change in an instant, leading to significant harm.
If sitemaps aren’t updated correctly, Google may struggle to find newly published pages, especially if they aren’t well internally linked.
If canonical tags are missing and the paid team launches new UTM parameters, your index could be flooded with duplicate pages.
Both of these scenarios have happened to my clients despite prior warnings to address these issues.
Migration support is another key example of technical SEO where growth isn’t the primary focus.
Many businesses attempt migrations without SEO involvement, often leading to disaster – a steep decline in traffic and visibility.
Important content gets lost, pages aren’t redirected properly, or critical errors appear in the code.
Below is a real-world example of a client who came to us after neglecting SEO in their migration. The results weren’t pretty.
This isn’t about growth but maintaining visibility, which will never appear in a growth projection.
The ROI of maintaining good site health is preventative, and that’s just as valuable.
Catching critical errors
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 likely don’t prioritize site health and indexing the same way.
That’s why a key part of SEO is ensuring that nothing is implemented that could harm your website’s visibility.
This might not seem like a major threat, but it happens all the time, especially in large, siloed teams.
Consider this real-world example: A client’s development team launched a code update that accidentally no-indexed an entire section of their website.
Fortunately, the issue was caught and fixed before significant damage occurred. But what if it hadn’t?
The problem could have gone unnoticed for much longer, costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars before they even realized it.
Catching this error alone paid for the entire SEO campaign.
Instances like this happen far more often than most business executives would care to admit.
If these threats aren’t factored into your SEO strategy, a crucial part of SEO’s ROI is overlooked.
Dig deeper: The top 5 strategic SEO mistakes enterprises make (and how to avoid them)
Fighting branded declines
One of the most common scenarios I see with businesses seeking an SEO agency is a slow, steady decline in branded traffic.
While SEO isn’t the best channel for recovering branded traffic, it excels at driving non-branded traffic to fill the gap.
This exact scenario played out with a client last year.
Adding up branded and non-branded numbers would show that total traffic is still down.
However, without implementing SEO recommendations to bring in non-branded traffic, the decline would have been much worse.
An executive reviewing the overall numbers may not see growth, but a keen eye will recognize that SEO successfully mitigated even more severe losses.
Don’t sell the value of SEO short
The goal of this article isn’t to spread fear – it’s to highlight reality.
Businesses and websites face numerous threats to their performance, from AI advancements and SERP changes to competitor activity, branded declines, and even internal mistakes.
SEO, however, serves as a crucial defense against these negative forces.
This perspective can be a tough sell, so many SEO agencies leave it out of their pitches. After all, no business wants to pay large sums of money just to stay flat.
But if there’s one key takeaway, it’s this: Positioning SEO as a defensive strategy is essential and will only become more relevant over time.
SEO absolutely drives growth, and that’s important. However, if growth is the only focus, the true value of SEO is being sold short.
Dig deeper: How to convince leadership why they can’t ignore SEO
source https://searchengineland.com/seo-defense-declining-organic-traffic-452569
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