Date: 13/10/2025
Subject: Organic SEO/Local SEO
Author: Ryan Christopher Walsh

Introduction

Let’s face it: we are in a cost-of-living crisis within Great Britain, and businesses are feeling the pinch too.

This means that many companies are looking for ways to save a few quid and cut their monthly expenses.

Businesses in the United Kingdom might therefore begin to think it’s a good idea to invest less in their search engine optimisation over the coming months. However, many companies find that after one or two months, there is little decline in organic traffic, yet past this the organic rankings might fall off a cliff.

Therefore a business can start to move down Google’s ranks if that marketing investment is not sustained with a company such as Ryan C Walsh.

It’s widely thought that organic traffic can drop by 25% to 40% in months five to eight, that’s if you don’t investing.

Also thought that this can decline even further and faster after this point.

Outdated content marketing

Then you have outdated content marketing to think about, perhaps also a lot of technical issues that start accumulating with website, and the website no longer being deemed relevant because the content marketing is no longer answering the shopper’s query.

For example, the question “What are the best and most energy-efficient washing machines in 2020?” , well that’s not going to be served on the first page of search results of Google 2025 because the page is no longer relevant. Those washing machines might not even be made anymore!

AI-powered search results and LLM’s

There are now many different ways people are finding businesses online, whether through Google’s AI Overviews, Chat GPT-5 or say

Perplexity of other artificial intelligence-powered search results. In short, there many ways shoppers can use to find businesses.

In this article, we will therefore examine carefully what happens when you stop paying for search engine optimisation (SEO) and whether it results in a gradual decline in customer vistor numbers to a website- or does it mean that your sales fell off a cliff?

How long does it take for SEO to stop working?

Many leading search engine optimisation experts widely believe this: businesses get lulled into a false sense of security when they stop working with marketing agencies that sales are unaffected. The reason is that there are often no notable drop-off enquiries in month one or month two after you stop paying.

Often, the work that has been implemented in the past will carry you forward for a certain amount of time, a bit like when the fuel warning light comes on in your car, you do have that amount of time before the engine completely stalls.

However, most experts feel that by months 4 to 5, with some major core algorithm updates have rolled out, you will start to drop off down

Google’s organic ranks as some of your direct competitors work on improving their SEO

Why can’t I pause and then come back to the work later?

Quite simply, if you stop investing, some of your direct competitors may not. So, for example, take any business, lets say a construction company, you might think—well, we don’t do much work over the winter; so lets stop paying the SEO company. However, if your direct competitors are investing and making consistent efforts to improve their SEO over the winter, they could emerge in the spring, often in a higher place on Google.

Search engine optimisation, therefore, requires consistent effort

What if the competition is just like light-years ahead?

This can often the case: you form a business that has just been set up and needs to start generating revenue straightaway. However, the problem is that direct competitors might have been investing in their organic SEO for, well sometimes decades before your business.

Therefore, there is a way to tackle this, but it involves more work in the shorter time frame, which will cost more.

So what exactly happens when we stop paying for organic / local SEO?

As we mentioned earlier, the website’s keywords may be stabilised for say a few months. Yet after that point we often see the organic rankings drop.. This is because Google bot will be indexing and crawling the website, yet noticing there’s no new links, no new content marketing, and that your falling behind your direct competitors in Cardiff. This is when the direct competitors will often move higher, simply because there content marketing is more relevant more up to date.

Content marketing and link building slow down, and website glitches begin to appear, leading to a drop in rankings when most businesses stop investing.

Major technical issues can accumulate.

Links can start to die off (deleted) as external websites stop linking to a domain name. This can often have a dramatic impact on the business’s organic search engine optimisation (SEO), as backlinks remain a primary ranking factor and therefore one of the main ways on getting a business onto page one of Google.

A breakdown of exactly what happens when a business stops Investing in organic search engine optimisation

Month 1 to 2 often no particular significant changes

This is often like a car coasting for a bit because of the momentum built by my engine previously; it is the same with businesses’ organic search engine optimisation. That is, you can coast forwards often for 1 to 2 months, but after that, you start to experience a decrease in organic traffic unless you keep improving the businesses SEO.

Months 3 to 4

This is often when the business starts to dip in organic traffic after they stop work on improving their SEO, leading to fewer leads / sales for the business. At this point, the backlinks might start to get deleted, as it’s clear to the Googlebot that there is no new content marketing added to the website.

Other businesses around you might be updating their websites more reguargly; adding quality content marketing say each week, this is why, when a company starts to get overtaken by direct competition.

Months 6 to 12

During these months, there will often be many Google algorithm updates, perhaps including a few core Google algorithm updates being rolled out during that period.

As the Google algorithm updates roll out, assessing your website against your competitors might mean its clear the direct competitors have built more links, have better content marketing, and have kept their websites updated

This is when it becomes clear your business is no longer investing in search engine optimisation, and it might start to lag behind direct competitors.

Chat GPT-5 mentions and citations on AI

It used to be the case for as long as we can think, businesses would primarily focus on their organic rankings on Google and GMB (Google My Business) rankings, as well as investing in Adwords.

However, there are new ways of gaining more business— that’s via artificial intelligence platforms such as ChatGPT and Perplexity which basically use citations.

Talk to any of the top SEO consultants in the world, and they will tell you that there are strong crossovers between organic search engine optimisation and getting businesses mentioned on the LLMS., One way to do this is to get a quality content marketing indexed, which means the work needs to be of very high quality to serve two purposes: your business being displayed more often on LLMs and also improving organic rankings at the same time. For this to happen the work must have a high Google E-EAT score.

The point we are trying to make, you loud and clear, is that if your business stopped investing in SEO, it’s perfectly possible that your visibility we reduce—both with your SEO and with large language models (LLM’s) such as ChatGPT—would decline.

This could be catastrophic for the business, as it could give its direct competitors a massive advantage.

For example, when somebody is looking for a high-value item, they might ask an LLM like ChatGPT to find a local company. Also turn to Google to find a local company, so if the same business appears on both; LLMS and Google, they will be more likely to be contacted by a shopper.

An FAQ regarding what happens when a business stops paying for SEO

Why do other companies delete backlinks?

So, one of the most significant reasons why businesses drop down Google’s organic ranks sharply is quite simply because their backlink profile has been weakend.. This might be because of having a high-powered backlink, such as a link from the Guardian newspaper that page might suddenly get deleted- which might cause the website itself to be moved down the organic ranks.

When you look at some companies backlink profiles, most businesses have a high number of backlinks; some even have hundreds of thousands quality do-follow links.

This is what gives the website authority, its strength, and the reason it ranks where it does in Google’s results.

As these backlinks are broken or removed by the linking page, it simply means our impact on organic rankings is dramatic.

Why is it important that content marketing is kept up to date?

Have to put yourself in Google’s algorithm’s shoes —think like Google would, just one second: it wants to serve the most relevant, up-to-date answer to the customer. Google also has billions of pages to choose from.

So why would Google’s algorithms pick outdated pages, written seven years ago that are no longer relevant?

Exactly, that’s why information needs to be kept up to date, relevant, and well-written.

Why is it important to choose an SEO agency you can afford over the long run?

Some businesses here in Cardiff, South Wales sometimes go to the biggest agency they can find, which often comes with a pretty hefty monthly price tag per month for SEO services.

However, what you have to remember is that it can take a long time for leads to start flowing from the organic SEO work, sometimes as long as 6 months for local search engine optimisation.

This is why you need to find an SEO business that offers the best value to you, not the most expensive provider, that’s because you might run out of funding for your marketing before the leads start to flow in.

Who is Ryan Christopher Walsh?

Ryan Christopher Walsh is one of the best SEO consultants in South Wales. He runs an agency, Ryan C Walsh Online Marketing, and has done so for the last 10 years. It is therefore one of the most highly experienced search engine optimisation consultants in this area.

We take on SEO packages ranging from 500 PCM to 2000 PCM for businesses here in Wales.

Therefore, if you require bespoke and high-quality search engine optimisation, then why not give us a ring today