SEO depreciation - what would happen if you did nothing?

In my recent webinar, Making SEO a Performance Channel for ecommerce, I argued that if we did no SEO at all we would expect a drop in performance.

I think this is relatively unsurprising - it's a competitive world, and everyone else would be continuing to invest while you stood still - but it's striking to me how many organisations assume that performance would stay flat if they did nothing.

Many SEO programs are judged against their year over year (YoY) performance which is another way of saying that they assume that this year would be the same as last year if they did nothing.

I wanted to try to figure out what the decline could look like. Obviously in the real world it's going to depend on many things including the market, the competition, what Google does, and more, but I wanted to find at least one example of the kind of effect I'm talking about.

I made some slides and recorded a short video to walk through my example showing the possibility of a 10-20% decline per year for an ecommerce site that did nothing:

If you prefer to read the slides:

It's unusual to see a natural experiment caused by companies simply stopping investing in maintaining their web presence. And many times when we do, they are complicated by other factors such as the company in question going out of business or facing trading difficulties.

I'd be very interested to hear how others have approached this modelling challenge, or any examples anyone has of sites being neglected, and the impact of the neglect. Drop me a note on Twitter or LinkedIn if you want to discuss.

You can check out the full webinar that this idea grew out of here.