Search engine optimization (SEO) continues to be one of the best ways for B2B companies to get organic traffic, improve their online visibility, and establish their brand authority. The numbers don’t lie: Marketers rank SEO as one of the top three most effective channels (alongside short-form video and influencer marketing), and SEO provides more than 20 times more traffic than pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements on both desktop and mobile devices.
But SEO—and what it takes to achieve and maintain SEO success—is often misunderstood.
There’s more to an effective SEO campaign than keyword research and short-term jumps in traffic. Building a strong and successful SEO strategy requires time, effort, resources, and consistency.
Google and other search engines are designed to give users what they want. Their goal is to recommend the information that is most relevant to a search and provide the best possible user experience.
To do so, search engines use crawlers and other bots to crawl websites and look for a variety of specific factors that help them decide how a web page should be ranked on a search engine results page (SERP). Quality guidelines, such as Google’s E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) standards, govern this process and allow search engines to assess website quality and content to determine SERP ranking.
How does this impact your B2B website, content, and online visibility? Because the vast majority of organic traffic goes to the first few search engine results.
On average, users spend less than one minute per search session on Google. That’s not a lot of time for people to spend on a search, so it’s no surprise that the first organic search result gets 27.6% of all clicks and is 10 times more likely to receive a click than a page in the number 10 spot. That means the higher a business ranks for a keyword or phrase on Google, the more organic web traffic it is likely to receive.
SEO is the process of optimizing a website’s content, technical configuration, and reputation so it ranks well and is easily findable on search engines. If you can successfully rank well for target keywords and appear in the results of your ideal audience more often, you can get more organic traffic and leads, build the reputation and authority of your brand, and improve your online visibility.
However, the important thing to keep in mind is that SEO is a dynamic field, with Google and other search engines changing their algorithms and users tweaking their online habits. The rules are also open to interpretation, so the world of SEO is always in debate about the nitty-gritty. Even so, a strong SEO strategy is the foundation of successful digital marketing, so it’s essential for B2B businesses to invest in SEO.
Contrary to popular belief, it takes time to see SEO results.
As you publish optimized content and tweak your website, search engine bots still need time to crawl your website and update SERPs to reflect those changes. While you may occasionally experience quick bursts of organic traffic, lasting results require time. Additionally, SEO results gain momentum over time—it’s a cumulative effect that can’t be rushed.
A 2024 poll by Ahrefs revealed how long it took respondents to see SEO results:
The reality is that SEO is a long game. The time it takes to see significant results relies on a variety of factors, including the history of your website, the resources you can invest in SEO, what your competitors are doing, and how well you are executing your SEO strategy.
When you pause a PPC campaign, you’ll see the impacts overnight. Unlike other digital marketing strategies, though, SEO decay takes time.
If you stop investing in SEO and halt all ongoing SEO efforts, you may not see immediate changes, and it may even take several weeks to see anything different. (Remember, it takes time to see SEO results, whether good or bad.) But eventually, your results will start to decline:
Unfortunately, just like SEO success is cumulative, so is SEO failure. When your rankings, traffic, and conversions start to slip, they’ll continue to deteriorate and get worse until you start using SEO to bring them back up again. And if your competitors continue their SEO efforts while yours are paused, they will swoop in and quickly outrank you.
SEO is not a short-term project.
It doesn’t have an end date.
SEO is an ongoing practice and a long-term strategy, and it takes continuous planning, efforts, resources, and maintenance to achieve and keep top spots on SERPs. From optimizing your entire website for optimal user experience to regularly publishing valuable content for your target audience, SEO must be a foundational part of your online presence if you want to see success.
Let’s dive a little deeper into why consistency is the foundation of SEO success—and why you need to keep at it, even if you achieve your SEO goals.
Ranking well on SERPs takes time and consistency. It can take months to see the initial results of your SEO efforts, and more importantly, maintaining those good rankings also requires consistent resources and effort. If you hit your SEO key performance indicators (KPIs) and then decide to halt your SEO efforts (even temporarily), you’ll start losing the ground you’ve gained and will see those great achievements go to waste.
Building up the authority, trust, expertise, and experience to rank well for a specific keyword takes time and consistency—there’s no way around it.
We used to live in an online content deficit, where it was easier to rank for competitive keywords and carve out your own space on the web. Now, we’re swimming in content—and even drowning in it, thanks to the artificial intelligence (AI) content generation that has swept the internet in the last couple of years.
It’s more important (and more difficult) than ever to stand out from the crowd with strategic SEO efforts based on valuable, unique, interesting, and helpful content. Getting top rankings on SERPs is a cutthroat battle. You may be competing with hundreds or even thousands of businesses for the same keywords and spots, and your competitors are working hard to gain ground.
If you want to halt your SEO efforts, keep in mind that your competition won’t. While your website and content remain static, your competitors will come for you and use SEO to surpass your site in search engine rankings. As they rise to the top, your website will be pushed further and further down in SERPs for your target keywords.
Search engine results are too competitive for your business to take a break and give your competitors an opening.
Publishing high-quality, valuable content that resonates with your target audience is key to higher search engine rankings and more leads. Fully maximizing your SEO potential, however, requires consistency—both in quality and in your publishing schedule.
After all, why would users keep coming back to your website if you don’t have something new to offer them?
Use a content calendar to plan a content creation, publication, and distribution schedule that aligns with the needs and purchasing habits of your ideal customers. And, of course, keep E-E-A-T in mind as you develop content.
Search engines, including Google, reward consistency and regular updates. Websites that are regularly updated, publish new content, change the information they have, receive new backlinks, and keep up with technical requirements tend to have higher rankings on SERPs.
When spiders and other search engine tools crawl websites, they look for changes and new content so they can update the information they have on a given website. If you discontinue your SEO efforts and stop with regular website updates, your rankings will start to suffer.
Google and other search engines use algorithms to rank search results. People work hard to find ways to exploit the algorithms and navigate the rules to achieve better results—like keyword stuffing in the early days of search engines or other “black hat” SEO tactics. But since Google wants people to create content and websites for users and not algorithms, it often changes the way it crawls and ranks websites.
With these regular tweaks and occasional larger updates, the SEO landscape is constantly shifting. And sure, the core of successful SEO remains the same—building web pages and creating content that is valuable, helpful, high-quality, trustworthy, accessible, etc.—it’s essential to keep up with these changes and adjust your strategy. What worked well last year won’t necessarily work well today, and in fact, you may be penalized for it.
You must stay on top of your SEO strategy and make sure you tweak it as algorithm changes roll out, which requires time, resources, and consistency.
Trends in user behavior change over time, from the keywords people use to search for a particular product or service to the way they access web content (such as the use of mobile devices or preference for video).
These changes in user behavior can directly impact the organic traffic and search ranking of your website. If you don’t change your SEO strategy to accommodate the purchasing behaviors and online habits of your target audience, you will start to lose your rankings and, consequently, organic traffic.
Keeping up with audience trends and user behaviors and adjusting your SEO efforts to meet the new needs of your users is a critical part of SEO success.
Returning visitors, new backlinks, SEO-friendly website updates, new content pieces—these are all opportunities to earn traffic and get more leads.
The great thing about consistently investing in your SEO efforts is that you’ll always be able to grab these opportunities as they come along. However, if you stop doing SEO, you’ll miss these opportunities to improve your rankings and increase your traffic and leads.
If you discontinue your SEO efforts, it means you’re not keeping an eye on potential issues that can impact your search engine rankings. For example, broken links, harmful backlinks, duplicated content on other websites, misconfigured txt files, and more are all possible and can lead to Google and other search engines penalizing your website—unless you resolve them (and quickly).
Unfortunately, if you don’t fix potential issues, you’ll miss out on leads and traffic and potentially take a hit in your ranking.
Part of a strategic SEO campaign is monitoring for issues and paying attention to potential risks on your website. Consistently looking for and addressing problems before they snowball into bigger ones is critical to SEO success.
Establishing yourself or your B2B company as an authority in your niche is the SEO dream. If you can build and maintain that authority, you’ll rank higher in search engines and be the first voice users to turn to (and trust) with their questions, concerns, news, pain points, and recommendations.
However, it takes time—and the regular, consistent publication of high-quality, relevant, timely, and valuable content—to build that authority among your target audience. If you halt your SEO efforts and stop creating fresh content in your niche, you’ll miss your chance to become an industry authority.
SEO is an incredible tool for getting organic traffic, increasing your online visibility, staying ahead of the competition, and building brand recognition. However, you’ll only see these benefits if you consistently invest in SEO.
If you want to maximize results and see long-term SEO success, it’s essential to dedicate consistent time, effort, and resources to SEO.
Are you running out of time to dedicate to your SEO strategy? Does your B2B business need on-the-ground guidance from SEO experts? Ready to put your SEO in the hands of industry-leading SEO professionals? You don’t have to do this work alone. Fortunately, there’s another option.
At OneIMS, we help B2B companies transform their existing SEO efforts—or create a new SEO strategy from scratch—in order to achieve their growth and revenue goals. If you’re looking for an SEO partner, we’re here for you. Schedule a consultation with us today to get started.