Case study · SEO recovery

Recovering the traffic lost in a botched migration

One of Spain's leading insurers has spent years building a health and lifestyle blog with hundreds of articles. A poorly executed platform migration cuts organic traffic in half overnight. Our job is to bring it back.

+35 %

organic sessions year over year, one year after the migration

80,079

ranked keywords, 365 of them in the top 3 in Spain

237,000

clicks in one year for the blog's most-read article

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01 · The starting point

The migration didn't account for SEO, and SEO made them pay

The blog changes platform with no SEO migration plan. Every article still links to the old domain, the sitemap hasn't been updated in years, and Google's indexing errors pile up with no one watching them.

The initial audit sorts the wreckage by impact: first what stops Google from reading the site, then what stops it from ranking.

What the audit finds

Organic traffic cut in half after the migration
Hundreds of internal links pointing to the old domain
A sitemap out of date for years and full of errors
Key articles deindexed through Google errors
404 errors eating up the search engine's crawl budget

02 · The strategy

First let Google read it; then make it want to rank it

01 Repair the technical foundation The internal linking to the old domain is fixed in one pass at the database level, the sitemap is rebuilt and resubmitted, and the 100 top URLs are reindexed with weekly tracking.

02 A chain of optimization Each hit article is worked as a chain: its on-page, the articles that link to it, and the articles with potential that should link to it. Selective link building only toward the worst-affected.

03 Judgment for a sensitive sector Health and finance demand what Google calls experience and trust: identified expert authors, updated articles, and FAQs in the highest-traffic content.

03 · The numbers

A year on, above the prior level

Comparing the same period the year after the migration, the blog doesn't just recover what it lost: it beats it.

Organic sessions: 39,248 versus 29,071 in the same period a year earlier
+32.6% users and 6.3% lower bounce rate
21,311 of those keywords ranked in Spain
The most-read article drew 4.2 million impressions in twelve months

Google Analytics screenshot comparing the same period across two years: the line for the year after the recovery stays above the year before, with 35% more organic sessions — Organic traffic, same period across two consecutive years · client's Google Analytics

04 · What the reports don't show

Recovering is harder than growing, and it's measured differently

The recovery coincides with one of the most volatile stretches of algorithm changes in Google's history, which hit health and finance content especially hard. Comparing one month against the last says nothing: every rise or drop could be the algorithm, not the work.

That's why the project is always measured against the same period the year before, and every report separates which part of the movement is ours and which part is Google. Growing against the previous year with the algorithm working against you is worth more than growing for a month with the wind at your back. It's less flashy, and it's more true.

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