One of the most common questions that we get before onboarding a new client for SEO services is “what happens if you stop doing SEO?”.
For many, search engine optimisation (SEO) is viewed as another business and marketing expense. Just another thing that you need to keep investing in. Whether that means paying an internal SEO team to take care of your SEO strategy or hiring an external SEO Agency.
Let’s take a look at what happens when you stop doing SEO, what your options are if you need to reduce your SEO budget and answer the most common questions that we get about when you can stop doing SEO for your website.
Here’s what happens when you stop doing SEO
SEO has a compounding effect, the longer that you are doing it, the easier it is to build consistency and improve organic search visibility. When you stop doing SEO, your search engine rankings will gradually decay resulting in a loss of search engine visibility and website clicks.
1. Your rankings will gradually decline
When you stop doing SEO for your website, you can expect your rankings to gradually decline. Unlike PPC marketing where you are essentially turning off a tap, with SEO, you’ll simply see a gradual decay in your search rankings and organic search presence. It may take a few weeks or even several months for you to begin to see the change, however, after time your search rankings will begin to diminish, and your competitors will overtake you in the search results.
2. Your enquiries and sales from organic will begin to slow down
When you stop putting time and resources into your SEO strategy, you can expect your enquiries and sales to begin slowing. When you rank at the top of Google (and other search engines) you enjoy the lion’s share of clicks.
This CTR by position article provides a good oversight of the difference in clicks experienced between position number 1 and position number 10 in the organic search results. As your rankings begin to slip, your organic search presence will slowly begin to diminish. If you rely on organic traffic for website leads, sales, and enquiries, then that will translate to a lower volume of enquiries and sales. Moving from position number 1 to position number 5 can reduce your click through rate by as much as 60%.
3. Your competitors will start to catchup
SEO is a competition. You are competing with other websites and businesses to win attention from search engine users. When you overtake your competitors, not only do you win more clicks and more attention amongst these users, but you also push your competitors further down the SERPs and reduce their chances of winning clicks.
Remember, just because you stop doing SEO doesn’t mean your competitors are going to stop. There isn’t a ceasefire in SEO. If you want to stay ahead of your competitors, it’s essential that you continue to produce high-quality content and resources that provide value to your target audience.
4. You stop learning about your organic visitors
Search engine optimisation marketing provides valuable insights into your market and what they are actively searching for online. SEO isn’t just about winning more organic visitors (although that is a big part of it), it’s also about understanding your customer, what they are looking for, their pain points, and understanding what is and isn’t working in your business.
Here’s some examples of how SEO can be used to learn more about your customers:
- Changing search demand
Changes to search volume provides insights into search demand. In a business sense, if you see a change in how users are searching for products, this is the sort of intel that you can feed into other areas of your business. If users are no longer searching for a particular product, it could mean that it’s time to change your order levels or rethink your pricing. Conversely, search demand can be used to gauge trends which can be leveraged to meet the needs of your target audience.
Data Courtesy of Ahrefs
Data Courtesy of Ahrefs
Let’s take the (rudimentary example) above. The decline in Blockbuster search versus the steady state of search demand for Netflix. Granted, this is a particularly obvious example, however, this same search principle can be used to assess products and services.
- Seasonality
Seasonality of products and services can change the way that you order products, allocate staff resources, and plan for the future. First hand SEO data and historical search trends provide valuable insights into peak periods (often lining up with sales data) which can be used to help with forecasting and planning.
Data Courtesy of Ahrefs
- Emerging trends
Search behaviour is one of the most effective ways to measure and forecast for emerging trends. This search trend data can be used to understand customer patterns, market demands, and emerging opportunities in the market.
5. When you stop SEO, you lose momentum
SEO is a momentum game. The more consistent that you are with SEO, the easier it is to see results. The slowest part of any SEO campaign is the first few months. In those months, you’re on a mission to win trust with users and with search engines. Once you win trust, your crawl rate, perceived trust, and site rankings all begin to improve. To keep that going, it’s important to continue to pursue on-site improvements, publish new content, and acquire new links that further improve your trust with users and search engines.
Here’s why stopping SEO isn’t a good idea
An SEO agency telling you that you shouldn’t stop doing SEO services – very predictable, right? As an SEO agency, we’ve obviously got a vested interest in businesses continuing to invest in SEO services, so let’s make sure that we’ve acknowledged that bias.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, here are some of the reasons why stopping SEO or putting a ‘pause’ on your strategy isn’t a good idea. After you’ve read this, you can draw your own conclusions and apply them to your own unique circumstances.
1. Your content becomes outdated
Fresh content or recently published, updated, or rewritten content will invariably rank above old, outdated content in the organic search results. Imagine searching on Google for ‘Best Smartphones” and you get an article from 2013 singing the praises of the iPhone 6 – it just doesn’t happen.
It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, Google (and other search engines) prefer to serve users with fresh content that is up to date with timely and relevant information. Content decay or content that has been left unchanged for months or years begins to slip down the search results – no matter how good it was when it was published.
2. You stop getting new links & can lose existing ones
As a rule of thumb, it can take anywhere from 4 to 10 weeks from the date that you acquire backlinks to the date when they begin to have a positive impact on your SEO. That means that if you stop building links tomorrow, you’re probably not going to notice an impact for a minimum of 4 to 10 weeks. Links take time to kick in, the links that you acquire now aren’t for your rankings tomorrow – they are for your future rankings.
When you stop doing SEO, you may stop acquiring links. Whether you acquire links through PR link building, traditional outreach, or through natural link acquisition off-the-back of content that you’ve published, they will invariably slow down.
Backlinks have a cumulative effect on your SEO which means that ‘stopping’ links for a period of a few weeks or a month won’t have an irreversible impact. Long-term, if you stop doing link building, then you are no longer sending positive trust signals to search engines which are used to gauge authority and trust.
The other part to this equation is that when you stop monitoring your backlinks, you will begin to see your backlinks begin to decline.
It could be because the website where your link was published decides to delete a page or they decide to remove a link. In most cases, you can expect to lose around 10-15% of your links over the course of a 12-month period due to external factors. Keeping an eye on your backlink profile means actively reaching out to sites when you lose links and ensuring that your links aren’t being removed (where this can be prevented).
3. You lose competitor visibility & market insights
As we mentioned above, SEO provides valuable market insights that can be used to inform broad business decisions. Whether that means gauging changes to product popularity or service demand, or it means looking at emerging trends in the market – it’s important to keep an eye on changing search demand.
In addition to understanding and tracking search demand, SEO also provides valuable insights into where your competitors are investing their time and effort.
Put it this way, if a competitor is investing SEO resources into a particular service or product, then there is a good chance it reflects where they are focussing their business efforts. When you keep an eye on your competitors’ SEO strategy, you’re not only checking up on their marketing, but you’re also looking priorities that run into their entire business operations.
4. Technical SEO errors begin to occur
For larger websites or websites with a lot of moving parts (think e-commerce), leaving your website untouched will invariably result in errors popping up. Whether that’s because a critical plugin becomes outdated, a page is moved or deleted, your SSL certificate expires, or simply because Google’s changing page speed requirements cause new errors to occur, websites require regular maintenance and technical SEO audits to ensure long-term health.
5. Your crawl rate can change
Crawl rate refers to the number of requests that a search engine crawler or search engine bot makes to a website on any given day. A healthy crawl rate means that Google’s search bots will frequently visit your website which can assist with indexing new content, recrawling updated content, and ensuring that your website remains a priority.
It’s not possible to set your preferred crawl rate with Google, however, there are a number of things that you can do to ensure that search bots regularly crawl, index, and rank your content. Regularly updating your website with new content, ensuring that there are no technical errors that waste crawl your crawl budget, earning backlinks, and regularly updating your content are all positive signals for crawl bots.
6. You fall behind the competition
Google measures your website against your competitors. The moment that you stop doing SEO, you begin to fall behind your competitors. A robust SEO strategy ensures that you are constantly monitoring your website, making changes based on search behaviour, acquiring new links, maintaining technical SEO, and publishing new content that continues to build trust with search engines.
Can I “pause” my SEO strategy?
“We’ve had something come up, can I put my SEO strategy on pause for a few months?”
Ok, let’s say you’re a business and you have had a number of unknown expenses suddenly pop up. You need to pay the tax office, or you need to allocate your budget elsewhere so you’re looking to cut expenses. Is it possible to put your ‘SEO’ on pause for a few months.
The short answer – yes, you won’t immediately lose everything that you’ve done.
When we talk about what happens when you stop doing SEO, we always use the ‘SEO fitness analogy’.
The SEO fitness analogy
The SEO fitness analogy is the analogy that we use for ‘pausing’ or ‘stopping’ SEO work.
‘Stopping’ SEO is the same as temporarily cancelling your gym membership. If you go back to the gym a week later and jump on the treadmill or begin to lift weights, you might not notice any real change. Now, take a month off the gym and try to do the same and it will be a very different story.
When you stop doing SEO for your website, you’ll start to lose ground on your competitors, and you’ll lose some of those important ‘gains’ that you’ve made during your campaign. If you stop SEO for a month, then you’re not going to lose everything. You may not continue to move forward with the same momentum, but you shouldn’t expect to go backwards immediately.
If you want to ‘pause’ and ‘start’ your SEO campaign every few months, it’s not a great strategy. Stopping and starting SEO work means that you lose momentum.
That fresh content, regular flow of links, and ongoing monitoring that got you to where you are all begins to fall off. It may not be overnight, but it will happen. Which is why we always say to clients ‘don’t start SEO if you don’t plan to stick with it’. If you’re not sure if SEO is for you, it’s simply not worth investing for a few months and then stopping to measure the impact.
SEO is about momentum, once you lose momentum, you begin to miss out on those breakthroughs that take you from position number 10 to position number 1 or 2.
When can I stop doing SEO?
When can you stop doing SEO and when should you stop doing SEO are two very different questions.
But let’s start with the first one. When can you stop doing SEO?
You can stop doing SEO whenever you like. As we’ve outlined above, if you stop doing SEO, you’re going to see a gradual decay in your search engine rankings which translates to reduced SERP visibility. It might not be overnight, but if you stop doing SEO, you will eventually see a decline in search engine rankings.
So then, when should you stop doing SEO?
You shouldn’t stop doing SEO. SEO marketing is applicable and valuable for just about every type of business.
How heavily your business relies on search engines to win new traffic and new business should directly influence how much you invest in SEO. I.e. if 90% of your new customers find you through organic search, then you should be investing a significant portion of your marketing budget into SEO.
On the other hand, if a small portion of your customers find you through organic search, you may be better off investing your marketing budget into more lucrative marketing channels.
In 2024, SEO isn’t a negotiable for most businesses. The amount of time and resources that you invest into SEO is always negotiable, however, completely neglecting SEO should never be an option.
