You know what’s often missed with a website?
It’s how SEO can and do keep the site in good health.
Now, when I say good health, I’m referring to how search engines interact with the site.
I’m referring to the crawlability of the site.
I’m referring to the site’s ability to maintain its visibility in the SERPs with the ongoing mission to improve it.
You see, SEO is often regarded as a marketing channel.
And it is. It’s absolutely a marketing channel.
But it’s more than this.
It’s a channel that can also be used for the development of your site.
Just like Devs are used to develop your site, so too can SEOs, from a slightly different angle.
An angle that looks at your site health for the purpose of maintaining its visibility in the SERPs.
Plus, more importantly, actively prevents its visibility from worsening.
But wait, you may say, SEO is an acquisition channel. It’s main function is to grow my site’s traffic.
Yes, it is. This is correct.
But, what is often not considered, is that, just as your site is able to grow its traffic, it can just as easily lose its traffic.
What I’m proposing to you is that if you are not actively working to keep your site in good health, with SEO, you keep it open to the risk of losing its search visibility because it falls into poor health.
So, whilst SEO is an acquisition channel, it’s also a channel that must be used to keep your site in good health in order to acquire the traffic you seek in the first place.
In fact, before your site is able to attain organic traffic, it has to be in an adequate state, a certain level of health.
And this level of health, increases as the search landscape grows.
Let me give you an example.
And for this example, I’m going to, again, revisit Google’s purpose, their mission.
They seek to organise the world’s information and present it to people who are searching for it – and they seek to do this quickly.
In order for them to find your site, you merely need to have it accessible, right? Crawlable.
This is the bare minimum to have your site indexed.
For them to present your site to users, this is the part that requires your site to be in good health.
Why?
Because of the element of competition.
In a market where there are several sites that are like yours, for Google to be able to rank them, they have to consider certain technical elements on the site.
This is what the term ‘site health’ pertains to.
The visibility of your site, on search engines, is dependent on the state of your site’s technical elements.
This is why page speed matters.
If your site is slow, it is not meeting Google’s requirements to be ranked – or ranked highly.
This is in consideration to the page speed of the other sites in the same industry as you.
This is why a site with an average page speed (across the board) may be low-to-average but may still rank higher than another site from another industry, which has a much higher set of speed metrics.
Industries matter. They matter a great deal.
If you’re not keeping atop of the main competitors in your industry, and are not consistently keeping track of your site’s technicals, what do you think will happen to your site’s visibility on Google?
It will drop. Wouldn’t it?
It will drop quicker than you’re able to rectify whatever the problem is.
Heck, you may not even notice its drop until waaaaaay down the line.
Down the line when rankings are affected.
By this point, it’s too late.
You’ll be reacting to an issue that has already affected your site.
An issue, which you may not even know.
It will require an SEO to figure out what the issue is and then to fix it.
All of this occurs because site health has been neglected!
So, you see, even if you believe you do not need SEO because you already receive organic traffic (without an SEO in place), even if you believe you do not need SEO because you’re brand focused, and aren’t interested in targeting generic keywords, you still need to consider SEO for your website.
This is why, you see, I say all the time, as long as you have a website, you need SEO.
When you look at SEO as an acquisition channel, you may believe you can do without SEO.
But when you consider the fact that SEO helps to keep your site in good health by monitoring its technicals, you see that SEO is more than an acquisition channel.
It’s a channel for users, whether existing or potential.
The health of your site impacts your search visibility – evolutionary.
If you don’t mind this, you’ll slowly lose it, and then before you know it, there’ll be a significant loss in your search visibility.
If you were in this predicament, you’ll be faced with the frustrating reality of SEO.
The reality that increasing your visibility, or regaining it, is a lot harder than maintaining it.
How do you avoid being in this predicament?
You simply keep your site in good health – consistently.
Site health is keeping mind of the technical and on-page metrics that’ll affect your site’s search visibility.
Daily visibility checks, for example, is something that an SEO would do – one assigned to technical.
When you do not have an SEO in place, the technicals of your site can easily be neglected.
How are you keeping with your site health?
This question is pertinent to you whether or not you have a focus on acquisition via search.
As long as you have a website, you need SEO.
And SEO, remember, is for users, not search engines.
