Implementing the recommendations restored indexation for previously excluded PDPs and PLPs, reversing traffic from -53% to +16% year-over-year, resulting in an +69% traffic recovery.
SEO CASE STUDY // Restoring Organic Visibility
Client Background
Market: United States
Industry: Interior Design // Luxury Textiles & Wallcoverings
About: High-end design brand offering fabrics and wallpapers for interior designers and homeowners
Jump to: Project Goals | SEO Strategy | Project Results
Before onboarding the client, the client migrated to a new CMS. Unfortunately this led to a major decline in traffic. The client needed a recovery plan that prioritized fixes based on impact, and to align web development resources to deliver a swift recovery.
At Rankability we love to hear how we can help you drive more traffic and revenue, and help you get started with SEO.
Your migration success starts with our expert support.
Current SEO state
The client decided to change their website infrastructure and platform, and understood that this migration can harm their search visibility and rankings. There was nobody within the organization who had enough SEO expertise to take-on this project.
Problem & Project Goal
Problem: Non-branded organic traffic dropped after moving to a new CMS due to incomplete implementation of SEO requirements.
Goal: Restore rankings and improve organic search visibility of the site overall.
Strategy
To accelerate recovery, we focused on delivering the highest-impact recommendations first, based on the previously developed SEO roadmap.
1) Prioritize fixes based on their projected impact on non-branded traffic.
2) Crawl the new site to identify critical technical issues affecting indexation and ranking signals.
3) Work closely with development teams to implement fixes in controlled order, from high to low impact.
4) Set up ongoing tracking to measure the effect of updates on organic visibility and global indexing.
What we did
We began by reviewing the SEO roadmap created prior to the migration and aligned it with the new CMS constraints. To guide implementation, we created:
- A site-move SEO checklist outlining required technical steps.
- A redirect mapping document to protect historical authority.
Our priority was to recover non-branded visibility for site sections driving the most valuable traffic: Product Detail Pages (PDPs) and Product Listing Pages (PLPs L2/L3).
During the first month, we implemented the most critical fixes:
- Legacy-to-new 301 redirects launched in three phases to avoid crawl inefficiencies.
- Dynamic metadata logic was added to generate Title tags, Meta Descriptions, and H1 headings for PDPs and PLPs.
- Canonical tags applied across new templates to consolidate ranking signals.
- Crawlability issues resolved for product grids, product descriptions, and top navigation internal links.
- Remaining enhancements were scheduled according to impact and dev bandwidth.
The results
After fixing issues with browser titles and metadata logic, previously excluded PDPs and PLPs began returning to Google’s index.
Within one month, the overall traffic trend shifted from –53% YoY to +16% YoY, reflecting the recovery of non-branded visibility and restored ranking signals.
Priority site sections (PDPs and PLPs) completed recovery within approximately the same timeframe, returning to expected organic performance levels.