SEO REPAIR | AFTER A REDESIGN, A MIGRATION, A HACK, OR AN AI-BUILT SITE THAT NEVER RANKED
SEO Repair and Rankings Recovery: The Redesign Looks Great. The Leads Are Gone. We Fix That.
A website that is flipped properly never goes into a straight downhill nose dive. When yours did, the cause is almost always one of six things, and all six are fixable. In 28 years, our best Houston customers are the ones who had to call us to repair a website that was a flip gone wrong. This is the work we are known for.
Galleria 713-703-3030 | Kingwood 281-852-8253
If the chart fell off a cliff
Find out why, free, before anyone sells you anything
The six usual suspects
What breaks when a site is rebuilt by someone who said they know SEO
The recovery plan
Put it back, then rebuild it right
If the old site still exists, the first move is often to put it back. A wilted plant recovers faster than a dead one. Then we map every old URL to its new home one to one, restore title tags and headings, rebuild the related-page connections, repair the broken backlinks we can find, and add what the old site never had: calls to action, schema, and pages written for AI citation. Most recoveries show movement in Search Console inside 90 days.
The repair is quoted after the free audit, because a site that changed its URLs needs a different amount of work than one that only lost its title tags. Once it is recovered, the Houston SEO program keeps it that way, and if the design itself is the problem, Houston web design rebuilds it without losing what we just got back.
A true story, names removed
From a couple hundred thousand a month to eight thousand
A lighting company with three partners was doing a couple hundred thousand dollars a month online. Two of the partners did not like how the site looked, hired a custom programmer, and got a prettier site that kicked out all the page-to-page support. Revenue fell to $20,000, then $8,000, before anyone called us. We brought the traffic back. The market had moved on by then, and some of that revenue never returned. The lesson is the timing: when the chart falls off a cliff, put the old site back that week, not that year.
How to know the redesign caused the drop
Read the chart, then read the tab
Line up the launch date against the Search Console or Semrush traffic chart. A properly rebuilt site shows a small wobble. A broken one shows a cliff within a few weeks of launch, and the keyword count on page one drops with it. One site we audited had more than a thousand terms on the first page of Google before the flip and 35 after, down 80 percent, because the pages were not preserved.
Then open the new site and look at the browser tab. If the title tag is the business name, look at the navigation. If it says Services and Solutions with no dropdowns, scroll to the bottom of an inside page. If nothing connects it to related pages, you have your answer, and so do we. Bring the before and after to the free audit and we will show you the six items on your site, in order. If you would rather learn the test yourself first, the Internet Marketing Clinic teaches it, and the how to choose an SEO company guide lists the questions to ask before the next flip.
What is included in the repair
- Before and after traffic and keyword history from Semrush and Search Console
- One-to-one URL map, old to new, with redirects written and tested
- Title tag and heading rebuild on every ranking page
- Navigation rewritten with words Google can index
- Related-page and hub connections restored on every page
And what the old site never had
- Broken backlink recovery, prioritized by the authority of the linking site
- Calls to action and conversion fixes
- Schema on every page, FAQ accordions with FAQPage schema
- Pages written for AI citation, not just for Google
- Weekly Search Console reporting until recovered
Find the real reason
Google algorithm update, penalty or site issue: what caused your ranking drop?
Every SEO recovery starts with the reason. A ranking drop usually comes from one of 3 places: a Google algorithm update, a manual penalty, or an issue on your own site. Each one needs a different fix, and guessing wastes months.
An algorithm update, such as a core update or a spam update, changes how Google judges content and links across the whole web. If your decline lines up with a confirmed update date, the fix is usually content quality, topic depth and trust signals, not technical tricks. A manual penalty is rarer and shows up as a message in Google Search Console under Manual Actions, often tied to unnatural links or spam. A site issue is the most common reason we find: a redesign that changed URLs, a robots or noindex error, a hacked page, a server problem or lost internal links.
We line up the date of the traffic drop against your launch history, your hosting changes and the known update calendar, then read the Search Console data page by page. Tools like Semrush and Ahrefs show which keywords and links were lost. That evidence tells us the reason before we touch anything.
The process
What should I do if my SEO rankings dropped? A step by step recovery plan
Step 1: do not panic and do not start changing everything. Random changes make the real problem harder to find. Step 2: check Search Console for manual actions, security issues, indexing errors and the date the decline started. Step 3: compare the pages that lost the most clicks against what changed on them. Step 4: fix the cause, whether that is redirects, title tags, thin content, a crawl error or bad links. Step 5: request indexing for the repaired pages and watch the result.
If the old site still exists and the drop followed a redesign, the fastest approach is often to put it back while we rebuild correctly. If the drop followed an algorithm update, the plan focuses on content: deeper pages, clear expertise, real examples and stronger internal links on each topic. If it followed a penalty, we clean up the links or content Google flagged and file a reconsideration request.
Most of the work is careful and unglamorous. It is also where our expertise shows. We have repaired sites after redesigns, migrations, hacks and updates since 1998. You can start the diagnosis yourself with our traffic drop analyzer or read what to do when a Google update affects your website.
AI search and clicks
How do I know if AI search hurt my website traffic?
Look at impressions and clicks separately in Search Console. If impressions are steady but clicks fell, people are still seeing your pages and choosing not to click. That pattern often means an AI Overview or another search feature is answering the question on the results page. If impressions fell too, your SEO ranking dropped, and that points back to an update or a site issue.
Clicks lost to AI answers are not always gone for good. Pages that give a clear, quotable answer, with real data and first hand experience, are the ones AI engines cite. Being cited puts your brand in front of the user even when they do not click right away. We rewrite the top of key pages to answer the question in the first few sentences, add FAQ schema and build the supporting content AI engines look for.
Our AI SEO services cover that side of recovery, so your visibility holds in both regular results and AI answers.
Traffic is not the goal
Why did my website lose leads even though I still have traffic?
Sometimes the rankings are fine and the leads still drop. The usual problems are a broken contact form, a phone number that changed, a page that ranks for the wrong topic, or a redesign that buried the call to action. Old pages, outdated offers and confusing content can also send mixed signals to visitors who arrive ready to buy.
We test every form and every call path, check which pages bring traffic that converts, and compare conversion before and after the drop. A site that gets the same visitors and half the calls has a conversion problem, not an SEO problem, and the fix is on the page.
Once the leads are back, we keep watching. Our Houston SEO program reports clicks, rankings and leads every month, so the next issue gets caught in weeks instead of quarters. Our conversion rate optimization guide explains how we lift leads from the traffic you already have.
Questions
SEO repair FAQ
Line up the launch date against the traffic chart. A properly rebuilt site shows a small wobble. A broken one shows a cliff within a few weeks of launch.
If it still exists and the drop happened in the last few weeks, usually yes, immediately. We then rebuild correctly while the old site holds the rankings.
Traffic usually does. Revenue depends on how long the site was broken and what the market did in the meantime, which is why speed matters more than anything.
Often. Most designers are good at design. We supply the SEO structure they were never taught, and we are happy to do it alongside them.
It is quoted after the free audit. A site that only lost its title tags is a different job than one that changed every URL and threw away its links. The audit tells us which one you have.
Close to it. A hacked domain recovers quickly with a clean rebuild, and we have done it. The cleanup is technical; the rankings recovery is the same six-item list, and the site goes onto hosting we tune and watch.
No, and it does not have to. The repair puts back what was lost. The SEO program grows it from there, and many repair clients continue on a plan, but it is a separate decision.
Find the date and the reason before changing anything. Check Search Console for manual actions and errors, compare the pages that lost clicks against what changed, fix the cause, then watch the data as Google recrawls.
If the decline lines up with a confirmed core or spam update and nothing changed on your site, an update is likely. The fix is usually content quality and trust, not technical changes.
Open Google Search Console and check Manual Actions. A manual penalty appears there with the reason. Most traffic drops are not penalties but algorithm changes or site issues.
People are seeing your pages but not clicking, often because an AI Overview or other search feature answers the question first. Clear, quotable answers on your page help you get cited and win back clicks.
If the chart fell off a cliff, call this week, not this quarter.
713-703-3030. We will look at the before and after with you at no charge, and tell you which of the six it is.
Galleria 713-703-3030 | Kingwood 281-852-8253 | info@verticalweb.com