Recovering from a botched site migration and achieving new historic highs in rankings and traffic.
The client came to me immediately after making a significant update to their existing website. They were facing a classic migration disaster:
With this known, it was time to audit and strategize. The stakes were high—every day without rankings meant lost potential clients and revenue.
Here is a breakdown of the audit, the findings, and the steps we took to fix the issues:
The first thing I wanted to see was the content of the old site. Using the Wayback Machine, I accessed it and noticed content had changed significantly. Most importantly, keywords had consistently been removed.
We restored most of the old content, but it only helped a little. After reviewing their website's backend, I found a widespread technical issue that was diminishing the strength of their backlink profile and, thus, their authority.
I worked with their developer to repair these redirects as quickly as possible. Over the course of 4-6 weeks, their link equity was restored, allowing the site to regain its authority.
The recovery graph tells the story of what happened after the strategy was fully realized:
The site rose, then plateaued, but with continued optimization work, the site was able to reach new levels—above anything it had achieved historically.
Along with a 60% rankings improvement (and correlating traffic improvement), the firm received leads that became multi-million dollar cases and added to its extensive portfolio.
Let's discuss how to recover your rankings and traffic after a site migration.
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