From broken migration to 56% more search traffic.

The client had migrated their site not long before we started working together. On paper that's a routine job. In practice it had left the site broken in ways you'd never notice from the front end, but Google noticed immediately.

About half of all pages weren't resolving properly. Redirect chains, errors, leftover URLs from the old structure. Googlebot was burning its crawl budget chasing dead ends instead of reaching actual content. Zero pages in the Good category for Core Web Vitals on mobile. About 300 pages indexed from a site that should have had far more. Average position across the site was 28, which is technically visible to Google but completely invisible to anyone searching.

First priority was fixing what the migration had broken. Redirect chains, pages throwing errors, URLs that weren't resolving. Getting the site to a state where Googlebot could actually do its job.

At the same time: page speed. The site was running a load of plugins that were dragging down performance without doing anything to justify it. Cutting those back dropped mobile load times and pushed Core Web Vitals from zero Good URLs to 185.

Start vs. end, the numbers are simple. About 45% of pages were returning a clean 200 OK when we started. By June it was 92%. Crawl response time dropped 340ms, from 1,590ms to 1,250ms. Indexed pages went from around 300 to 449.

None of this is the interesting bit of SEO. There's no content to show for it, no ranking to point at. It's just the work that lets everything else function. Fix the foundations and Google takes another look at the site. In this case that reassessment was fast.

By June the site was getting around 950 organic clicks a month, up from 580 in January before we'd started. Over the comparable 14-week window year-on-year, average weekly clicks were up 56%. June specifically came in 87% ahead of the same month in 2025.

The position shift matters more than the click numbers at this stage. Pages that were sitting on page 3, visible to Google but functionally invisible to anyone searching, are now at the bottom of page 1 and the top of page 2. That's where content work actually does something. Trying to optimise a page at position 22 is largely a waste of time. At position 14 it's a different conversation.

Average CTR is still under 1%. A properly optimised page at these positions should be pulling 2 to 4%. That's a content problem, and it's what phase two is for.

Technical work is done. Phase two is content, category by category, with Halloween first. It's the site's biggest season, the pages are untouched, and there's four months of demand building toward October.

Conservative target is 1,500 clicks a month by the end of the phase. With a strong Halloween: 2,500 to 3,500 during peak. The groundwork is there. Now it's about actually turning up in search when it counts.