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PROBLEM · SOLVED BY SEO & ORGANIC GROWTH · PROGRAMMATIC WEB DEVELOPMENT · CONTENT & EDITORIAL

Lost rankings after a redesign. Almost always self-inflicted, almost always recoverable.

A redesign that drops rankings 30-60% usually broke five fixable things. Here's the technical recovery audit and the order we run it in.

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60–90
Days to first organic signal
4
Common symptoms
3
Pillars that fix it
3
Verticals where this hits hardest
90
Day rolling cycle to fix
Symptoms

If any of these sound familiar, this is your problem.

If two or more of these are happening at once, you almost certainly have the underlying problem — not the symptom you came in to fix. The diagnosis below explains why.

01

Organic traffic dropped 30-60% within 2-4 weeks of launch

02

Pages that ranked for years now don't even appear in Search Console

03

New URLs throwing 404s with no redirects in place

04

Schema, meta titles, internal links — all looked good in Figma, all broken on staging

Root cause analysis

Four underlying causes — ranked by frequency.

The visible symptom is rarely the actual problem. These are the causes we find most often when we run the diagnostic on operators with this exact pattern.

  1. 01

    Indexation gap

    Critical pages are not in Google’s index, or they are indexed under the wrong query intent. Rankings are downstream of indexation.

  2. 02

    Thin content vs. competitor depth

    Rivals shipped 1,800-word pillar pages with FAQ schema. You shipped a 350-word service page. Google chose accordingly.

  3. 03

    Technical foundations broken

    Core Web Vitals failing on mobile, schema markup absent or malformed, internal-link structure flat. Every page is a one-off.

  4. 04

    Buyer-intent mismatch

    You rank for queries your buyer doesn’t use, or you target queries with no commercial intent. Traffic without conversion is a vanity metric.

Why it happens

The root cause — in plain English.

Designers and developers solve for visual coherence. Search engines reward continuity of URL, content depth, internal link equity and schema. Most redesigns ship with a redirect map that handles half the URLs, a content rewrite that strips the very phrases that ranked, and a nav rebuild that orphans key pages. Google doesn't know it's "the same site" — it sees a new site that's 40% emptier with broken legacy URLs.
How we diagnose it

The first three things we check.

Five-step recovery audit. One: pull a Screaming Frog crawl of the new site against a Wayback snapshot of the old; flag every URL that lost its redirect or its primary keyword. Two: compare H1, title and word count on every commercial page pre/post launch. Three: rebuild internal linking so every money page has 5+ contextual inbound links. Four: re-apply schema (Organization, LocalBusiness, Service, FAQ). Five: log-file check that Googlebot is actually crawling the new URLs at the old rate.
The solution

The pillars that fix this.

Each pillar is productised — fixed scope, fixed weekly delivery, walk-away rights at every 90-day cycle.

PILLAR

SEO & Organic Growth

Open the full pillar to see the productised stack, deliverables, pricing and 90-day roadmap.

Open the pillar → PILLAR

Programmatic Web Development

Open the full pillar to see the productised stack, deliverables, pricing and 90-day roadmap.

Open the pillar → PILLAR

Content & Editorial

Open the full pillar to see the productised stack, deliverables, pricing and 90-day roadmap.

Open the pillar →
What good looks like

The success state, in measurable numbers.

If we run this engagement and these four things are true 90 days from now, the problem is solved. Anything less is partial credit.

SUCCESS · 01

Organic enquiries 2x within 90 days

Compound climb, week-on-week, against the converting queries

 SUCCESS · 02

Indexable pages 4x

Programmatic + editorial, every page tracked + scored

 SUCCESS · 03

Average position climbing weekly

For your top 50 commercial-intent queries

 SUCCESS · 04

Branded + non-branded balance

Healthy mix where non-branded grows faster than branded
The cost of waiting

Organic recovery from a botched redesign typically takes 4-9 months — every week without the audit is another week of paid ads subsidising rankings you used to own for free.

First action this week: Crawl your old site on Wayback and your new site with any free crawler — diff the URL lists and the redirect map gap is your first repair list.

Book the 30-min diagnostic →
Free 2-page diagnostic

Send your domain. We’ll send back a 2-page diagnosis.

Specific to your stack, scoped to this problem. Three quick wins. A tailored band for the work it would take. No call required.

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The fix roadmap

What we ship in the first 30, 60 and 90 days.

A productised cycle on this problem follows the same rhythm: audit, build, ship, compound. Below is the cadence by phase — same pattern whether you start with DWY coaching, an embedded sprint, or a full DFY retainer.

Phase 01 · Diagnose

Find the actual cause

Written audit pack within the first two weeks. Tracking, attribution, content depth, technical foundations — scored red, amber, green with named owners and dated next steps.

Phase 02 · Foundation

Fix what blocks every other fix

Server-side tracking live, schema deployed, GA4 events firing correctly, CRM routing tested. Foundations ship before campaigns — no exception, no shortcut.

Phase 03 · Ship

Weekly delivery, on cadence

Pages, posts, schemas, ad creative, email sequences. One weekly drumbeat, every Friday in your portal. Three cycles before we stop iterating on what we shipped.

Phase 04 · Compound

Read the signal, double down

Cycle review with named numbers. Keep what shipped value, kill what didn’t, propose the next 90 in writing. Walk-away rights at every cycle boundary.

Tools we use

Industry-standard, never proprietary.

Every tool below is one you can sign into yourself, take with you when we’re done, and keep running without us. We don’t run black-box dashboards on top of your data.

Google Search Console
Ahrefs or Semrush
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Sitebulb
Schema App for JSON-LD QA
GA4 for behaviour, GSC for query
FAQ

Six honest questions about this problem.

If yours isn’t here, drop it in the contact form and we’ll answer in writing within a working day.

How long until we know if this is actually fixed?

Time-to-signal canon is 60–90 days. Some shifts (tracking fixes, schema deployment, speed-to-lead automations) move numbers in week one. The compounding signal — the steady week-on-week climb you can chart on a single line — lands in cycle two, around day 60. By cycle three you can read the rate of climb and forecast.

What’s the smallest viable engagement we can start with on this?

Either a £750 standalone audit (5–7 working days, written) or a £3,000 two-week embedded sprint against a fixed scope. Both credit against the first cycle of a DWY or DFY retainer if you sign within 30 days. Neither requires a long-term commitment.

Why is the “cost of waiting” number so high?

It’s the median we see across operators we’ve audited in your size band. The mode is lower; the right tail is much higher. A 20-minute discovery call gets you a tighter range specific to your spend and stack — in writing, no obligation.

We have an in-house team already. Do we still need this?

Not necessarily. If two or more of the symptoms above are showing, weekly coaching at £750/month (the Coach plan) often gets your team unblocked without a full retainer. We tell you which way is right for your team in the discovery call — and we tell you in writing if the answer is “you don’t need us.”

Do you work with our existing agency, or do we have to switch?

We work with both. About 40% of our DWY engagements run alongside an incumbent agency — we coach the in-house team, the agency keeps shipping. We’re open about scope. If the existing agency is the actual problem, we’ll say so in writing and let you decide.

How do you measure success on this specific problem?

Three numbers, every cycle: the headline metric this problem affects (CPL, conversion rate, organic enquiries — whichever applies), pipeline value attached server-side, and one downstream commercial signal that maps to your buyer journey. We don’t lead with vanity metrics like rankings, impressions or share-of-voice — they’re leading indicators, not commercial outcomes.

Where this hits hardest

The industries that feel this most.

INDUSTRY

Professional Services & B2B

Open the industry hub to see how we run this work for professional services & b2b operators.

Open the hub → INDUSTRY

Real Estate & Property

Open the industry hub to see how we run this work for real estate & property operators.

Open the hub → INDUSTRY

Trades & Home Services

Open the industry hub to see how we run this work for trades & home services operators.

Open the hub →
Adjacent problems

Operators with this problem usually have these too.

PROBLEM

We're not on page one for anything that matters

Page-one rankings come from intent, indexation and authority — not blog volume. Here's the diagnostic order we run and what we fix first.

Open the diagnosis → PROBLEM

We don't get leads from Google — at all

If Google sends you no leads, it's rarely a ranking problem. It's usually intent, indexation or a contact form nobody can find. Here's where we look first.

Open the diagnosis → PROBLEM

Our site is slow and we're losing visitors

A slow site costs rankings, leads and bounce rate — but the cause is usually pagebuilders, image weight and third-party scripts, not hosting. Here's the fix order.

Open the diagnosis → PROBLEM

Our content sounds like everyone else's

When all your competitors' websites read the same, generic content fails twice — Google and humans both ignore it. Here's how we rewrite for differentiation.

Open the diagnosis →

Browse all 30 problems →

Three ways to fix this

Read the playbook, get coached, or have us ship the fix.

You can solve this yourself with the playbook below, get a senior practitioner reviewing your work each week, or hand the whole pillar over on a productised retainer. Whichever you pick, the canon is identical.

DIY · Self-serve

Read the playbook

If you have an in-house team with the bandwidth to run an audit and ship the fix yourselves, the playbook is free.

From £0

144 free playbooks · templates £49+

The full diagnosis, the audit checklist, the deliverable templates, and the 90-day roadmap. Same canon we use on retainer.

  • 50+ page playbook for the pillar that fixes this
  • Audit checklist — the 8–10 things to check first
  • Deliverable templates — GA4 spec, briefs, schemas
  • Quarterly office hours — bring your work, get reviewed
Open the playbook →
DWY · Done with you

Coach us through it

For teams that have hands but want a senior practitioner reviewing the work each week and unblocking quickly.

From £750 / mo

Coaching · cohort · sprint

Weekly 1:1 or team coaching, a custom course built around this exact problem, plus optional embedded sprints.

  • Weekly 90-minute coaching with a named practitioner
  • Custom course built around fixing this exact problem
  • Embedded sprints — we sit in your tools 1–2 weeks
  • Audit pack with named owners and dated steps
See coaching plans →
Most chosen
DFY · Done for you

Ship the fix on retainer

We run the pillar that fixes this, end-to-end. Fixed scope, weekly delivery, server-side tracking from form-fill to closed-won.

£1,500 – £6,000+ / mo

Foundation · Compound · Architect

The bands above. We diagnose in week one, ship the first fix in week two, and run the cycle on rolling 90-day terms with walk-away rights.

  • Productised pillar with named owner and dated 90-day roadmap
  • Server-side tracking from form-fill to closed-won
  • Weekly delivery — no scope creep, no surprise invoices
  • You own everything — tools, data, accounts, content
Book a discovery call →
Keep going

Related content for this problem.

The pillar that fixes this, the industry hub where it hits hardest, and the playbook combo most relevant to your context.

The pillar that fixes this

SEO & Organic Growth

Open the full pillar to see the productised stack, six deliverables, 90-day roadmap and pricing band.

Open the pillar → Where this hits hardest

Professional Services & B2B

Industry hub with vertical-tuned audit baselines, sub-vertical architecture, regulators, and named-client examples.

Open the hub → Combo playbook

SEO & Organic Growth for Professional Services & B2B

The exact playbook we run for this combination — audit, deliverables, action sheet, FAQ. Free, no email-gate.

Read the playbook →
Ready to fix it

Book the 30-min diagnostic.

Bring one number you want moved and one constraint you cannot break. We’ll spend the first five minutes on those, the next twenty on the playbook that fits, and the last five on whether we’re the right studio for you.

Book the call → Browse all 30 problems
Operating across the Weir family network — Josh Weir·Mark Weir·Weir Digital Media·CMW Consultants