A redesign cost them their traffic. Here is what it took to get it back.

This project ran in 2022.

A small culinary site rebuilt their website and lost their search traffic doing it. By the time they came to me, clicks were down to about 1,000 a month and the keyword rankings that had been feeding the site had thinned out.

Why a redesign does this

Almost nobody loses traffic in a redesign on purpose. It happens because the new site is treated as a design project rather than a move, and the things search engines were using to understand the old pages quietly do not survive the trip.

That is what had happened here. The site looked better than it ever had and search could no longer read it properly.

The order I worked in

Technical first, because nothing else matters while a page cannot be reached or understood. Once that was solid, content.

I built out pillar pieces on the themes the site was already known for, then worked the related and semantic terms into them, which matters more for recipe content than most people expect.

Then internal links across the recipes, guides and tips, so the site held together as one thing rather than a pile of pages.

Four months later

Keywords went from 1,600 to 4,200. SERP features went from none at all to more than 410.

Positions one to three went from 9 keywords to more than 60. That last number is the one that matters most. Ranking somewhere is not the same as ranking where people click.