As a leading UK SEO agency, our clients often ask us what actually happens if you decide to pause or stop your efforts.
If you stop investing in SEO, rankings don’t always fall immediately — or at all — and, in some cases, can continue to rise further. This is due to a variety of external and internal factors continue to influence your site’s performance in search engines over time.
If you are more familiar with paid search advertising (PPC), you may naturally assume that online visibility and traffic will drop off the moment you stop paying your SEO retainer, however, the longevity of SEO results is one of the biggest differences between SEO and PPC.
Here’s a look at what might affect your rankings if SEO activity stops:
Technical SEO Errors Caused by Website Edits
Even with SEO on pause, your website might still undergo updates — whether that’s content changes, plugin updates, or structural edits. These changes can sometimes introduce technical issues such as broken links, indexing problems, or slower page speeds. Over time, if these aren’t noticed or addressed, they may affect user experience and search visibility. This factor tends to always have a negative impact on your rankings, unless of course you happen to fix an error without realising it when making changes to the website.
Changes to Existing Website Content
As your team updates or rewrites content — whether for clarity, branding, or product changes — those edits can influence how pages perform in search results. For example, removing relevant keywords, altering headers, or changing page intent can shift how search engines interpret the content. Unless there is specific SEO strategy behind these changes, the overall impact is likely to be negative, however, general improvements to content quality would generally have a positive impact.
Dilution of Previous Content by the Addition of New Website Content
Adding new content to your site is typically a positive step. However, over time, you might end up with several pages covering similar topics or keywords. This can make it harder for search engines to determine which page is the most relevant, especially if new content is not linked intelligently to and from older content, potentially leading to keyword cannibalisation. If this occurs, it may affect the rankings of both new and existing content.
If you stop investing in SEO, rankings don’t always fall immediately — or at all — and, in rare cases, can continue to rise further. However, a variety of external and internal factors continue to influence your site’s performance in search engines over time. Here’s a look at what might affect your rankings if SEO activity stops.
New Backlinks
Your site may still attract new backlinks even without active link-building. These can come from partners, customers, bloggers, or mentions in the media. In some cases, these links might improve your authority and rankings. In others, low-quality or irrelevant links may not have much impact — or could even be detrimental.
Lost Backlinks
Backlinks are naturally lost over time. For example, linking pages might be removed, sites may shut down, or content may be rewritten. If high-quality links are lost and not replaced, it could reduce your site’s authority in the eyes of search engines. That said, the effect of lost backlinks can vary depending on their significance and the overall strength of your site.
Increases or Decreases in the Number of Branded Searches
Branded searches — where users search specifically for your business name — can reflect public interest and brand strength, and search engines including Google regard these as a significant vote in your favour, and it is believed that they use them as part of their ranking algorithm to decide where your website should be positioned in the SERPs. A rise in these searches might support better visibility in search results, could affect your rankings negatively, even if no other SEO-impacting changes take place. This particular factor is rarely included in SEO campaigns, even when you’re paying an SEO retainer to an agency, but is instead impacted by broader marketing, reputation, or industry trends. PR activities, social media activity, and public exposure at exhibitions and other events, can all impact your rankings positively by increasing searches for your brand, even after you’ve paused your other SEO activities.
Competitors Improving or Damaging Their SEO
Your competitors may continue to optimise and invest in their online visibility. If they improve their content, earn new backlinks, or enhance technical performance, they may begin to outrank you — even if your site itself hasn’t changed. In contrast, if competitors make mistakes or lose ground, you may gain rankings in comparison to them — as they fall down the ranks, you will naturally rise up to take their place.
Changes to the Google Ranking Algorithm
Google regularly updates its algorithms to refine search results. Some changes are minor, while others may significantly shift how content is ranked. A website that hasn’t been updated to reflect newer ranking factors might not perform as well after a major update. However, great content typically improves in rank after a major Google Core update, as most of their updates are focused on rewarding good content, so in effect, your content was optimised for their new criteria ahead of time. Older pages can continue to rank well if they remain relevant and technically sound. Conversely, the rank of spammy or badly formatted or low quality content may well be impacted negatively following a search engine algorithm update.
Conclusion
Stopping SEO doesn’t guarantee that your rankings will drop, nor does it mean they will stay the same. Many factors outside of active optimisation can continue to influence how your site performs in search over time — from content changes and technical updates to competitor activity and algorithm shifts. Understanding these factors can help you make informed decisions about your digital strategy, whether you continue SEO work or not.
When comparing SEO with PPC, the slow-start to SEO has a flip side when you consider the ‘slow finish’, i.e. the long lasting evergreen results long after active SEO investment has been paused are often overlooked when assessing marketing ROI.
Please do bear in mind that if you pause the SEO input too long in a competitive market, competitors may get quite far ahead in the interim, and you may find it tough to catch up once you notice the rankings starting to slip. The causes of those ranking drops may have been gathering momentum for several months before you finally see them impacting, and it may take you several more months of intense SEO investment to turn things around.
