After a website becomes successful, after the SEO is on to newer projects, it happens.

A phone rings on the hip of the SEO responsible for that beautiful 1st page search result of last month. “What happened? Why did it fall?”
Here it is: short list.

• Your site became stale
• Link decay
• Aggressive competition
• You fell for an email scam
• You tinkered with the code yourself
• You thought you’d hold it w/o ongoing assessment of your market

Here’s what you should have done. Retained an SEO. Not “hire” one.

A “retained” SEO instinctively and loyally nurtures your website and it’s visibility, watches the competition, continually runs analysis of the forces working for and against your website and always considers the long term affects of any decision made concerning your site. A “hired” SEO will do their magic and then they’re gone.


Better than anything else I mentioned about retaining one is that all that work is done without you worrying. Success of the site is a reflection on the quality of the SEO’s service. If a link partner drops yours, no worries - it will be noticed and that site will be amended or their link will disappear - don’t worry because the retained SEO will get new ones - you do your job and we’ll do ours.

A retained SEO may cost more than a short-term consultant but you can rest assured that the guy that put your site on top is NOT now working for a competitor of yours - with intimate knowledge of your site, why it succeeded and how it can be defeated.