The Challenge

A $200K redesign that erased a decade of search equity.

Eighteen months before our client came to us, they'd hired an agency to redesign their website. Within weeks of launch, the damage was clear: 95% of their keyword rankings were gone, 80% of their SEO-sourced pipeline had vanished, and even branded searches had dropped out of the top 100.

They spent over a year hoping things would recover on their own. They didn't.

By the time we started our engagement with them, they had just 57 keywords in the top 10 — only 13 of them non-branded. A company selling enterprise field service software was essentially invisible to every buyer who didn't already know their name.

The complication: they'd just paid for a redesign. Another one wasn't on the table. The recovery had to happen through SEO, CRO, and content — working within the site they had.

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Our Approach

Fix the brand first. Then build for buyers who are ready.

No rebuild, no relaunch — every gain came from strategy, content, and conversion work on the existing site.

1. Diagnose before touching anything. We started with a full content audit and a redesign impact audit to map exactly what the relaunch had broken — down to recovering their Google Search Console account, which had been lost in the transition. A competitor intelligence report and fresh keyword research told us where the winnable ground was.

2. Branded keywords first. Brand equity affects every channel, not just SEO. Before chasing new traffic, we got their branded searches back to positions #1–2 so the pipeline they already had stopped leaking.

3. Repair the site they had. A big share of the recovery came from pages that already existed but weren't pulling weight. We ran SEO tuning across 33 existing pages, rewrote and copy-edited underperforming content, reclaimed platform, solutions, and integrations pages that had been gutted in the redesign, fixed orphaned pages, and rebuilt internal linking so authority actually flowed to the pages that convert.

4. Build bottom-funnel content for active buyers. With a revised keyword strategy across their three core verticals, we produced dozens of content briefs from a master template. Integration pages, industry pages, product and pricing-adjacent pages: the things prospects were literally searching for while comparing vendors.

5. Earn the authority back. Recovered rankings don't stick without link equity, so we built a backlink strategy and executed it — guest posts and link insertions on relevant industry sites, targeted at the pages doing the commercial work rather than sprayed across the blog.

6. Optimize for the machines buyers ask now. Every page was structured for search engines and LLMs — direct answers, clean headings, citation-ready formatting. We track AI visibility the same way we track rankings, so we can see when ChatGPT and Perplexity start recommending the client and which pages earned the mention.

The first SEO page went live October 13, 2025. The first non-branded closed-won deal came 87 days later.

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The Results

Pipeline that pays for itself in under 3 months.

The recovery shows up at every stage of the funnel. Keywords in the top 10 grew from 57 to 449. Non-branded traffic is up 147.8% year over year, and SEO-sourced MQLs are up 468% — from 19 to 108.

But the number that matters most: before we started, our client had zero non-branded pipeline. Every SEO-sourced deal came from people who already knew their name. Today, non-branded search accounts for $913K in pipeline, 28 demo requests, and 2 closed deals — buyers who found them because they showed up where the evaluation was happening.

And it's not just Google. LLM-sourced traffic is up 499% year over year, with conversions from AI assistants up 1,300% — because every page was built for how buyers actually research now.