SEO is a bit like going to the gym. It’s okay to miss a workout here and there, but things soon start to fall apart if you stay at home eating chips too often. (Trust me, I know.)

Here’s what it looks like when you start neglecting your SEO:

5 neglecting seo

Before this period, I was actively optimizing the site. Then, I neglected it and shifted my attention to other things. You can see that traffic slowly declined over the following months.

There are several reasons this can happen:

Your competitors overtake you (by consistently working on their SEO).

You start losing backlinks due to ‘link rot.’

Your content loses ‘freshness’ (more on this shortly).

That’s why most SEO professionals (74.71%) charge a monthly retainer for their services, rather than an hourly rate or one-time fee. They know SEO is an ongoing process and that their clients need to invest long-term to see results.

Is this true for absolutely all sites? No. There are rare instances where a site can be neglected for years and continue to pull in consistent traffic month after month.

Here’s one example:

6 consistent traffic

It was last updated in 2011, yet still pulls in an estimated ~500 monthly organic visits.

3. Google only ranks ‘fresh’ content

Republishing content is something we do a lot. If we filter for republished posts on the blog in Ahrefs’ Content Explorer, there are 136 since 2016.

7 content explorer republished

So why are we investing so much effort into keeping our content fresh if freshness is a myth?

The workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on. Clicks are the number of clicks coming to your website’s URL from organic search results.

‘Freshness’ is a query-dependent ranking factor. That means it matters more for some queries than others. It all depends on whether the freshness of the content has any impact on content quality.

SEO is continually evolving, so freshness matters for many SEO-related queries.

For example, here’s what happened when we didn’t update our list of the top Google searches for months:

8 top google searches traffic dip

You can see that traffic was declining for months, but then recovered pretty much overnight when we refreshed and republished it. That’s because the top Google searches change all the time, so people expect ‘fresh’ results.

On the flip side, freshness doesn’t particularly matter for a query like “how to tie a tie” because the process never changes. That’s why Google is quite happy to rank pages in the top three that were last updated in 2013.