How a Mid-Market Home & Furniture Retailer Recovered Organic Traffic After a Botched Site Migration
A technical SEO audit and fix-up following a replatform that tanked rankings — an 8-month engagement.
Illustrative example — anonymized, for demonstration purposes; not a specific completed engagement.
Situation & Complication
The client had just completed a full website replatform when organic traffic began falling almost immediately. Within the first month, sessions had dropped from roughly 42,000 to the low 30,000s, and the trend kept sliding for two more months before it stabilized. A quick review made the cause clear: the migration had shipped without a proper 301 redirect map, so a large share of previously-ranking category and product pages were returning errors or resolving to the wrong destination. On top of that, the new faceted-navigation filtering system was generating thousands of near-duplicate URL variants, diluting crawl budget and confusing which version of each page search engines should index. Category pages had also gotten noticeably slower under the new platform, compounding the ranking losses with a Core Web Vitals problem. The result was a retailer watching its single largest lead-generation channel erode in real time, with no clear internal owner for the technical side of the fix.
What I Did
- 01Full 301 redirect mapping from every legacy URL to its live equivalent
- 02Rebuilt and resubmitted the XML sitemap to reflect the new site structure
- 03Canonicalization fixes to resolve faceted-navigation duplicate content
- 04Core Web Vitals optimization on category page templates
- 05Structured data (schema) implementation across product and category pages
Results
View monthly data
| Month | Organic sessions |
|---|---|
| Month 1 | 42,000 |
| Month 2 | 38,249 |
| Month 3 | 33,970 |
| Month 4 | 32,816 |
| Month 5 | 33,331 |
| Month 6 | 32,937 |
| Month 7 | 33,309 |
| Month 8 | 34,325 |
| Month 9 | 37,488 |
| Month 10 | 40,092 |
| Month 11 | 42,659 |
| Month 12 | 47,446 |
Where the rankings moved
View keyword data
| Keyword theme | Start position | End position |
|---|---|---|
| furniture | 24 | 14 |
| home decor | 30 | 12 |
| sectional sofa | 31 | 19 |
| coffee table | 40 | 29 |
| outdoor patio set | 23 | 5 |
View monthly data
| Month | Organic conversions |
|---|---|
| Month 1 | 417 |
| Month 2 | 395 |
| Month 3 | 377 |
| Month 4 | 345 |
| Month 5 | 350 |
| Month 6 | 335 |
| Month 7 | 343 |
| Month 8 | 403 |
| Month 9 | 417 |
| Month 10 | 442 |
| Month 11 | 430 |
| Month 12 | 536 |
“We saw the writing on the wall after our migration tanked our rankings — this fixed it faster than we expected.”
VP of E-commerce (title only, name withheld)
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