Nick Ferran is a Consultant Shoulder & Elbow Surgeon with a very successful private practice.

Nick had been working really hard on his SEO and had a lot of traffic. He wanted to take his SEO to a new level and hire an SEO company to help him. This was extremely successful, but after moving the website hosting, his website traffic went from 15K to 10K monthly, and he became concerned.

Despite several meetings with the SEO and hosting agency, the situation worsened. Nick invited us to look at what the causes may be and provide a solution.

Nick’s website was in a dominant position within the search engines but this was fading rapidly. We needed to ascertain whether it was a problem due to the site migration or something else.

The website had been doing well from the recent efforts of an SEO company and we could see the content was optimised and fulfilled Google’s E-E-A-T objectives on the whole. So, it wasn’t the content. We had to dig deeper, so we started with the following:

Having found no signs of malware, and the technical checks all panned out, including the page speed of the website, we were coming up blank.

It was when we checked Google Search Console that we found our first clue.

GSC was showing a large number of pages had been de-indexed because of redirects. This means a URL is no longer available, and the instruction to a search engine is to redirect to another URL. This is perfectly acceptable as a practice, but Google doesn’t like it if it is done at scale, and this is what we were seeing.

All the URLs of the blog posts had been redirected during the migration. These pages were responsible for a large proportion of the site’s traffic, and this was very likely to be the main reason for the downturn.

We reinstated the old URLs and asked Google to index the pages again.

This action, combined with disavowing a fair number of toxic backlinks, halted the traffic decline.

You can see in the image above the drop was sudden and quite significant.

The fix was not difficult, but it wasn’t immediately obvious, even though the evidence was there in GSC.

When we presented our findings to Nick, he recalled that the SEO company had changed the blog URLs to increase site traffic. This had been a step too far, and Google did not like the change. It had been forgotten during the migration and wasn’t spotted until we found it.

In order to maintain an advantage online, your website traffic must be constantly monitored to ensure the search engines are happy with the continual changes that are made. These changes must be logged as it is easy to forget what has been done because so many are required. It is a constantly changing landscape that requires a cool and professional hand to keep the ship steady.

Fortunately, Nick’s website has continued to sail without hitting any more icebergs.