Technical SEO improvements: case study and results

Technical SEO engagement overview

This case study covers a 12-month technical SEO engagement on an Australian WordPress website that was technically indexed but not meaningfully ranking. Work combined crawl fixes, Core Web Vitals improvements, content structure, internal linking and schema - applied in sequence, with Search Console and GA4 used to verify each phase.

The Website Performance Baseline: Month Zero

• Near-zero organic clicks (~200/month plateau)
• No pages ranking on page one for any commercial query
• Mobile Lighthouse performance ~38, LCP ~4.8s, CLS 0.24
• Duplicate meta titles and missing descriptions across ~60% of pages
• No structured data; flat internal linking; orphan URLs

Before / after ranking examples

Specific queries tracked in Google Search Console, comparing month 0 average position with month 12:

• Primary commercial query A: position 48 → 4
• Long-tail informational query B: not ranked → position 2
• Category query C: position 31 → 7
• Local + service query D: position 22 → 3
• Branded + modifier query E: position 12 → 1

Query names redacted for client confidentiality.

Traffic delta

Pages fixed and what was fixed on each

• Homepage - title/H1 alignment, schema (Organization, WebSite), hero image compression, internal links to service pages
• Service parent pages - restructured H1/H2, intro rewrites, added FAQ, BreadcrumbList schema
• Top-10 commercial pages - unique meta titles/descriptions, query-targeted H2s, internal links from blog, Article/FAQPage schema where relevant
• Blog - cluster refactor: hub-and-spoke internal linking tying informational posts back to commercial pages
• Orphan URLs - either linked from the nav/footer/service pages, or 301'd to the right canonical
• robots.txt / sitemap - cleaned, resubmitted in Search Console; indexation monitored weekly

Core Web Vitals - before / after

What that looked like in revenue terms

Organic traffic became the primary acquisition channel over the 12 months, replacing a reliance on paid search for non-branded intent. Lead volume attributed to organic rose roughly in line with clicks; cost per lead from organic trended to near-zero as paid spend was scaled back.

What to take from this

If your site is indexed but invisible, the cause is rarely one big thing. It's a stack of small ones compounding. The order of work matters more than any single fix. Crawlability and Core Web Vitals went first, because Google won't reward content it struggles to render or reach. Unique titles and a heading structure mapped to real queries came next. Internal linking came last - and it's the lever most sites never pull. Pointing the authority a site already has at the pages you actually want to rank moved positions here faster than new content did. None of it was quick. The rankings built over months and then held, which is the part paid traffic can't buy. If you do only one thing yourself, map your internal links and fix the orphan pages.