The nastiest SEO problem we’ve seen in the last five years is sadly one that happened to one of our ex-clients. It’s also one of the most avoidable.
Before we become culpable for schadenfreude, we’d like to point out that we worked happily with this organization since 2016 – nine long and prosperous years. We love these folks – hard-working professionals who were easy to help, warm and friendly, and who do genuinely life-saving, difficult jobs. But they slammed into a tough SEO problem of their own making: they redesigned their website without talking to their SEO agency (us) and then did not hire a replacement SEO. Instead, they relied on a web designer, who claimed to be doing all the SEO things for them.
A Few SEO Problem Pro Tips
Pro tip: if your web designer says they’re doing all the SEO things, you might want to check their credentials, ask for the traffic profiles for their clients, and maybe ask an impartial SEO for advice.
Pro tip #2: flipside is also true. If your SEO pitches a fit when you ask for traffic profiles, doesn’t want to share passwords, and resists working with a qualified designer, your SEO is probably a scammer.
Okay, Back to the Problem at Hand
Anyhow, here’s a chart of their organic (Google search) metrics, going back to 2015:
That brick wall they hit in early 2025? That’s the SEO problem in a nutshell.
Here’s another, simpler chart from a different tool, showing keywords the site was “ranked” for during the span of the project. These are words (or more accurately, phrases) for which you could search (like “buy pergola austin” for a shadesail company) and find the client website in the top 100 Google results. Peaking at 2520, this number is now at 646 and still dropping. That’s a whopping 74.4% loss in website value.
The Problem Dissected
So what, exactly, went wrong? We can tell you.
- SEO Problem #1: They didn’t talk to their SEO first. (Ha! You saw that one coming, didn’t ya?)
- SEO Problem #2: The new designer didn’t talk to the SEO. Duh. They were too busy trying to steal our client.
- SEO Problem #3: To give them credit, the client DID introduce us to the designer and we advised the designer on how to stop the bleeding and salvage whatever SEO value was left. But the designer or client ignored our advice. We know there were some costs involved in salvaging several important pages that were top 20 in Google nationally for key searches. Where are those pages now? Trashed.
- SEO Problem #4: Of course, we communicated #3 clearly to the client, several times, with supporting charts and data. We hate to see our hard work go down the proverbial tubes. No dice.
- SEO Problem #5: The client was more concerned with the appearance of the site than the functionality, and did not really hear us when we emphasized that we built the site as a courtesy. We stressed that design and SEO are two different functions, that we do both if desired, and that we are happy to work with a designer at any time. Perhaps we failed to communicate this clearly enough.
- SEO Problem #6: Did I mention those important pages? A good web designer looks at the old site carefully and, before launching a new site, does what’s called “301 redirects” to point traffic to similar pages, retain SEO value, and make life easier for users. It’s like call forwarding for webpages. This was not performed for any of the pages that were trashed.
- SEO Problem #7: To be fair, for some of the pages that got trashed, there may have been a lack of similar pages. Less content, fewer pages. A proper transition would have involved possibly building new pages, even if those new pages didn’t have the same functionality as the old. Better something than a giant heap of nothing.
Pro tip #3: Got a thorny SEO problem? if you want to increase the value of your website and get more customers/visitors, talk to our professionals at Sparkleworks for some free marketing advice. We really will tell you how to fix your website for free and our pros know what they’re talking about.