The Real Cost of Ignoring SEO

Hey, it’s Mike your friendly Canadian B2B SEO.

I've been catching up with some brilliant marketers lately—past clients, new roles, teams under pressure to do more with less. Across all of these conversations, a clear pattern emerged:

SEO isn’t urgent until something breaks.

It’s easy to deprioritize. Until traffic slips. Or leads stall. Or you're paying to get in front of people who used to find you organically.

This is what I’ve been hearing from folks on the ground–here's what it actually costs when SEO falls off the roadmap.

One Page Outranking Your Entire Site

“I found out a competitor had one page that got more traffic than our entire site. Just one page.”

When that hits, you realize: SEO isn’t an optional lever. It’s a compounding advantage. And if someone smaller is doing it better, they’re stacking growth while you play catch-up.

You Only Notice When It’s Too Late

“We weren’t sure what was happening—rankings dropped, traffic slowed. Eventually we found duplicate canonical tags were confusing Google.”

No error message popped up. No dashboard flagged it. Just months of missed opportunity—quiet and expensive.

SEO Quietly Falls Apart When No One Owns It

“We had someone more junior in place temporarily. Within weeks, we were ranking for the wrong stuff.”

It doesn’t take long. You step away, and SEO becomes a backlog no one touches. Rankings drift. Authority slips. Traffic declines. Slowly, at first–and then all at once.

You Start Paying for What You Could’ve Earned

“We’re spending more than ever on paid. SEO is the only lever that doesn’t come with a credit card attached.”

Let your organic ranking slip, and you’ll buy that traffic back—at $20, $50, even $100 per click. It’s not strategy. It’s a slow, expensive bleed.

The Backlog Becomes a Black Hole

“There was always a list of fixes. But there was always something more urgent. SEO didn’t make the top of the list.”

The list doesn’t go away. It gets longer. And when performance finally drops far enough to cause panic? Now you’re trying to sprint through the traffic marathon based on six months of neglect.

You’re Invisible in the AI Layer

“We want to show up in ChatGPT when someone asks for the best tools in our space.”

Search isn’t just Google anymore. AI tools are pulling content, summarizing answers, and influencing decisions. If your content isn’t structured, authoritative, and useful—it doesn’t show up.

Recovery Costs More Than Maintenance

“Right now, SEO’s not even a thing for us. I just need someone to get us back to baseline.”

This is the most common one. By the time teams ask for help, they’re not optimizing, they’re triaging–that's way harder than starting early.

TL;DR: If SEO’s On Your List, Move It Up

You don’t need a 50-page strategy to get started. You need ownership!

• Fix what’s broken.
• Prioritize key pages.
• Build some internal links.
• Stay consistent.

Because when SEO slips, it doesn’t just cost you rankings. It costs you time, money, and momentum–

And momentum is everything.