What happens when you stop investing in SEO? A case study

A question almost as old as SEO itself is “What happens if I stop investing in this?” Whilst it’s obvious that you’ll start to lose rankings and head backwards, there has been little data on the impact on the business bottom line.

We just started working with an old financial services client, one who invested in SEO for half a decade but decided to put down the tools in 2022. We’re starting where we left off, with a 3-year gap in activity and the data to show that impact that has had.

It is interesting to review our old keyword rankings documents and compare where they are now. At first glance, they still rank on page one of Google for some decent volume keywords, though no longer in the top positions, which has impacted click-throughs and traffic. For the more competitive searches, they are now on pages 2, 3 and beyond. The overall trend is a large decline in search engine visibility, which has impacted their traffic, web enquiries and new business revenue.

The financial impact

Back in 2022, they were getting 5 leads a day organically. We know this partly due to the tracking set-up in their Analytics and also because during Covid, we paused all of their PPC ads for an extended period and saw that many enquiry form completions. Now, in mid-2025, they are getting just 1 lead per day. An 80% drop over 3 years.

They convert 12% of their leads into customers and earn an average of £4,900 in fees and commission per deal. Those 120 extra leads they used to get each month would have meant 14 sales, worth an expected £68,600 in monthly new business revenue. Or £832,200 per year!

What is the cost of stopping your SEO? For this brand, it’s well in excess of £1m when you factor in repeat custom and average customer lifetime value. That’s about 1/3 of their sales target, so it has had a massive impact on their growth and profitability.

This is a competitive market, and it’s just one example; your mileage will definitely vary, but it’s a clear illustration of the impact on long-term revenue when you start slipping down the search engine rankings. It’s something to be factoring into any decisions on where to invest, or continue investing, in digital marketing budgets.

A new strategy for a changing market

Fortunately for our agency and our client, things are starting up again now. We’ve got unfinished business, and it starts with reclaiming those old positions. Goal one is to get them back up to 5 leads a day, and then we’ll expand out to additional keywords.

They are also going to push the pedal harder on paid media, to top up the sales team whilst we rebuild the organic positions. In this case, each lead via PPC costs about £110, so that’s a £440 a day cost to get the leads back to where they want them. This £13,000+ in monthly spend could have been avoided if they kept just a minimal, maintenance-level SEO retainer going at less than half the price.

One thing worth noting is that for their most lucrative business loans keywords, the cost of PPC via Google Ads has jumped considerably. When we were running paid search 3 years ago, it was around £15 a click for a top ad position, but competitors are now spending up to £60. It’s 4x as competitive here, yet their organic rankings have only slipped a page for those terms. This tells me that their rivals haven’t been investing in SEO as aggressively, or if they have, then it’s not paying off yet. This makes SEO a better place for our client to invest in this loan product, as PPC cost is too restrictive,e but there are a number of SEO quick-wins to be had.

If you are stepping into digital marketing again after a hiatus, then it’s worth reviewing the various channels to see if things have changed in your market, or if certain products/services of yours are now competing in a different arena.

Why does this happen?

When a business stops spending on SEO, there are a few things that happen and cause erosion. Unlike PPC, your traffic doesn’t drop as soon as you stop investing; it’s more of a slow decline, one which is caused by several factors:

1. Competitor activity: If rivals are investing in SEO and you stop, they start overtaking you. For decades, SEO has been taking a growing share of marketing budgets, meaning new rivals are entering the fight all the time. They push the level of activity needed to compete, compounding the issues for a site which stops SEO investment.
2. Algorithmic changes: Google regularly changes the factors affecting rankings. If you don’t have an in-house SEO team or an agency keeping you at the forefront, then it will harm your future position and, in rarer instances, could even lead to rankings penalties if you fall foul of the most important, quality-based ranking factors.
3. Website decay: Search engines want users to have a great experience however, a lack of investment usually means usability suffers. Your site speed falls behind rivals, you stop ticking the U/X boxes, which not only turns off search engines but also potential customers.
4. Outdated content: Google wants to serve users with fresh, helpful content. It also changes the guidelines on how content should be scored, for example EEAT (proving Expertise, Experience, Authority and Trust with your blogs). Pausing the creation of new content and not upcycling older blogs is damaging, not just to their relevance to search engines but the limited organic visitors you do still receive will be less likely to convert.
5. Lost backlinks: If you aren’t performing outreach and implementing Digital PR tactics, then you’ll not be adding those valuable links to your site, especially not the authoritative, relevant ones that make the biggest impact. A lot of links also drop off over time, as external websites update their content or archive old posts. Whilst your rivals are building new links, yours are dying off, which is why this is probably the hardest, most time-consuming part of SEO to fix and get back on course.
6. Consumer habits: Keywords change in popularity over time, and new search terms are being used every day, which is why it’s important to keep an eye on search trends and update your keyword strategy accordingly. How people search also changes, such as the current fast-growing trend of using AI tools to help research products and services. Not investing in SEO means a lower likelihood of showing up in places other than just Google.

The importance of an SEO-driven website migration

There’s a bit of a trend at the moment, as the finance brand is just one of a number of lapsed clients to come back to us in recent weeks. Both of the others had changed their website recently and hadn’t considered the SEO impact.

Publishing client

They decided to invest their SEO budget into social media two years ago, meaning little attention has been given to their website since. During a rebrand, they changed their website significantly, and unfortunately, the developers botched the migration. If we were still working with them we’d have been able to hold their hand through this process and limited the impact.

They are now being visited by less than 10% of their previous organic visitors, which is tens of thousands of people a week. It will likely take a couple of years of investment here just to get them back to where they were.

Wellbeing client

Whilst the poor website migration was the issue that made them take note and brought them back to us, looking in Analytics there was a noticeable decline in traffic for the 3 years before that. Just like the finance brand, they didn’t notice it at the start, but after a couple of years, they began to feel the business impact. The 90 or so leads a month dropped to around 80 in year two and then dropped again to under 70 last year. They now sit at around half of what they were.

Each sale is worth around £26K in revenue and £9K in profit. They convert 1 in 12 leads. Those lost 40-45 leads is a loss of at least 3 new customers a month, worth nearly £80K in revenue and £27K in profit.

In summary

One of my SEO team members summarised it well with the gym analogy. Stopping your SEO is similar to when you stop exercising. You won’t feel slower or weaker straight away, but over time there’s a gradual decline and at some point in the future you’ll look back and say “I can’t believe how fit I used to be” and you’ll hate the thought about how much work it’ll take to get back to that level again.

Rankings start to slip, traffic declines, conversions fall, and it can lead to a big hit in your sales. In the case of our B2B finance client, to the tune of about a million pounds a year. So think long-term and about the impact of that lost revenue when considering whether you should stop your SEO investment.