“Have You Tried Turning It Off and On Again?” is a phrase that you are almost certain to have heard at some point in the last decade. It was taken from the highly popular British TV comedy “The IT Crowd” and abruptly turned into an office meme for a generation of clerical workers.
There are many issues, after all, that can be resolved with a good old-fashioned reboot of your hardware or software. Any type of behind-the-scenes code that’s stuck in a state of misbehaviour is swept away when you restart a computer or computer program. Turning it off and on again actually works!
The idea of “turning it off and on again” can even be applied to some aspects of digital marketing, such as paid search campaigns and social media. If something’s wrong with your PPC conversions, then sometimes the best thing that you can do is to pause the ads whilst you figure out what is causing the problem. Once you’ve made the required fix, you can resume the campaigns.
Similarly, with social media, you might be running a weekly class of some kind and only wish to advertise on social media when you are actively seeking new recruits. All these types of campaigns are designed to be easily paused so that you can manage your budget for these services in a cost-effective manner.
There are many, many things that can benefit from being turned off and on again, this, however, doesn’t apply to your SEO.
The difference between SEO and other aspects of marketing is that SEO is about more than just instant leads. It is about consistently working to market and elevate your website and your brand presence in search. As a business, you must continue to remind users that your company exists. If you give up on this, you may as well be handing the missed business opportunities to a larger, more well-known competitor.
When you stop an SEO campaign, your rankings in Google search will drop. It might take days, weeks or even months, depending on the competitiveness of your keywords and the players in the industry, but it’s a solid guarantee that eventually, your competitor’s rankings will rise above your own to dominate you.
SEO is about proving your trust and value to users and encouraging them to return to your website again and again and to recommend you to their family and friends. These are the kinds of signals that Google looks for when crawling and indexing webpages. When you stop your SEO campaign, you stop sending the signals that are needed for Google to understand that you deserve to be ranked higher.
This is why it is important to keep the momentum going on your SEO campaigns, even when times are quiet, even when times are difficult.
The good thing about SEO campaigns is that they can be reactive to business and can still help target instant leads via inbound and outbound marketing. However, a good SEO campaign should be considered the real driving pulse of an online business, and a pulse is not something that should ever be turned off, not until the very end.
