Clients who engage with an SEO consultant or an SEO agency may wonder why they should continue doing SEO after they achieve their desired results. Most often those asking this question are in spaces where the barrier to entry is high such as a hyperlocal result that requires a large real estate investment or a commercial service that requires a large capital investment.

Because SEO requires an ongoing investment, most consultants and agencies charge a monthly retainer fee to keep working on SEO, review analytics data, and answer questions. Business owners may see this as a useless cost once they achieve the ranking results they want.

However, the internet is a low barrier to entry environment. Anyone at any time can compete and only those who continue to invest in their position tend to maintain it or even grow the ROI from their SEO efforts. There are a few reasons for this:

1. As we discuss under “What is SEO?” search engines are constantly updating their algorithms to keep users happy, take advantage of new technologies, and fight spammers. Sometimes this means a search engine might make a requirement to rank highly that your current iteration of the website or content doesn’t match. For example in 2014 Google began giving a small ranking boost to websites that use HTTPS instead of HTTP and publicized this to try and push the web towards security. When Google first launched it introduced a cataclysmic change, their new engine did not use the meta keywords tag which previous engines such as Alta Vista, Excite, and Lycos used to rank documents due to it having been abused by spammers. Instead, Google used this tag to try and help find websites they thought were spamming the web and reduce their potential rankings.

2. The internet itself is constantly being updated. A good website ranking highly in Google or another search engine could have hundreds of other websites linking to them. Over time some of those websites may get deleted, the links could be removed, the content could become removed from an engine’s index killing any value of the link provided, engines could change how they determine value of links pointing to your site, or the links could have attributes applied telling an engine the link is not trusted such as nofollow or ugc.

3. As stated earlier the internet has a low barrier to entry, meaning anyone at any time can create a website to compete against your business. Since engines rank documents not necessarily businesses, this means your website could experience ranking competition from websites that don’t necessarily compete against your business directly. For example a remodeling company in a medium-sized market might easily rank against other remodeling companies in that market, then stop SEO efforts. Seeing this a large remodeling services listing site such as Home Advisor might determine this is a market they could put more efforts into and take the top ranking away.

4. As the internet evolves consumers / internet users are constantly changing what they are looking for and how they are looking for it. When the iPhone was released in 2007 it led to a jump in local searches, when Amazon launched the echo device in 2014 voice searches using really long sentences became common place. If you’re not actively working on your SEO in both cases you would have missed opportunities and likely felt the negative impact as your competition did continue investing in their SEO.

One analogy is to think of the internet like a drag race track that goes from now into infinity. You are racing your car along with various other cars (your competitors). Your gas peddle is SEO, you want want to press it to the floor when you start because you want to catch the leaders and take the lead. As you travel along and pass others you see no reason to continue at the same level or at even at all. You take your foot off of the pedal and determine you can simply cruise the rest of the way. However, another car far behind you has pressed their foot to the pedal and is now moving at a faster pace and will soon pass you.