The Problem Nobody Inside the Company Could See

A routine quarterly checkup turned up something nobody inside the company had noticed. Traffic had fallen sharply. The phone had gotten quieter. The company had started paying for ads to compensate.

Nobody had connected those three things until I looked at the numbers.

A regional construction company had hired me to do quarterly SEO checkups. Routine work. Check the numbers, look for anything unusual, report back.

One quarter, the numbers looked very unusual.

Site traffic had dropped sharply. Rankings that had been solid were gone. The company had started paying for ads around the same time, frustrated that the phone had stopped ringing the way it used to. Nobody had connected those two things.

I dug in and found the cause. An internal employee had rebuilt the website on a new platform. In the process, a 20-plus page site had been reduced to a single page. All the content that Google had been indexing for years, the service pages, the location pages, the project descriptions, was simply gone.

Nobody had flagged it as a problem. From inside the company, the site still looked like a website. From Google's perspective, almost everything had disappeared.

The ad spend wasn't a strategy. It was an accidental response to a collapse that nobody had diagnosed.

Protecting Access When an Employee Leaves

Around the same time, the company was letting that employee go. I flagged something most business owners don't think about until it's too late.

When someone who manages your website leaves, you need to make sure you retain full access to your domain, hosting account, and any tools they were using on your behalf.

Losing access to your own domain is more common than you'd think, and recovering it can be a lengthy, expensive process. We made sure everything was documented and transferred before the departure.

The Rebuilt Site and a New Problem

After the site was eventually rebuilt, the new version had its own issue. The home page featured a video and that was it - no supporting text at all. It looked sharp. But Google indexes text, and there was almost none on the most important page of the site. It also confused site visitors who expect the home page to explain what a company does.

A tool I use to assess sites gave it an F for SEO. After I addressed the missing onsite optimization, added proper text and structure, and worked on the content, the same tool gave it an A+. That took about three weeks.

The internal thinking had been that visitors don't want to read much. That's a common assumption, and it's partially true for human visitors who scan rather than read. But Google reads everything. Thin content and missing text are among the most common reasons established business websites don't show up in search.

One More Save

Later, the owner saw a competitor's home page video and wanted something similar, but longer and more polished. It looked impressive.

I explained what a large video file does to page load speed, and what slow pages do to both Google rankings and visitor patience. We kept the existing video. A page that loads quickly and ranks well is worth more than one that looks great but drives people away before they've read a word.

The Takeaway?

A quarterly checkup isn't glamorous work. But it's how you catch the thing nobody inside the company noticed. Internal teams are close to the work. They see changes as improvements. An outside eye sees what changed, what it cost, and what's coming next.

The most expensive website problems are usually the ones that went undetected the longest.

Client details have been changed to protect confidentiality.