← Case Studies · Engineering · Ireland
From 30 to 300+ Clicks Per Month: How an Irish Engineering Company Recovered Lost Rankings After a Site Migration Gone Wrong
A new website design looked great on screen, but the developers forgot to maintain the URL structure. Rankings collapsed, backlinks pointed to dead pages, and organic traffic fell off a cliff. Jan Smolorz diagnosed the damage, rebuilt the technical foundation, acquired new backlinks, and created targeted content. The result: a 10× increase in monthly organic clicks.
10×
Click Growth
From 30 to 300+ organic clicks per month
30+
Technical Issues Fixed
Broken redirects, crawl errors, and structural problems resolved
New
Backlinks Built
Replacing lost link equity and expanding domain authority
15+
Pages of New Content
Service and pillar pages targeting untapped search demand
The Challenge
A Site Redesign That Wiped Out Years of Search Equity Overnight
The engineering company had spent years steadily building their online presence. Their old website had accumulated valuable backlinks from industry directories, trade publications, and partner organisations, and Google had rewarded that authority with solid rankings for their core service terms. Then came the redesign.
The development agency delivered a clean, modern site, but changed every URL in the process. No 301 redirects were implemented. Every link pointing to the old site now led to a 404 error. Google’s crawlers returned to find the content they had indexed no longer existed. Rankings collapsed within weeks as the new site had no way to inherit the authority that had been built up over years.
By the time Jan Smolorz was brought in, organic clicks had fallen to around 30 per month, a fraction of what the site had been receiving. The diagnosis was straightforward: broken URL structure, lost link equity, thin content, and a Google Search Console account full of crawl errors. The recovery required working across three disciplines simultaneously: technical SEO, link acquisition, and content creation.
What I Did
A Three-Phase Recovery: Technical Foundation, Link Equity, New Content
⚙
Technical SEO Recovery
Conducted a full technical audit using Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, and Ahrefs. Mapped every old URL to its new equivalent and implemented comprehensive 301 redirects, ensuring backlink equity flowed correctly and users were never dropped on a 404. Resolved over 30 crawl errors, fixed duplicate content issues, corrected canonical tags, and rebuilt the XML sitemap.
🔗
Link Building & Equity Restoration
Identified all referring domains pointing to broken URLs and contacted site owners to update links where possible. Supplemented this with a targeted outreach campaign to earn new backlinks from Irish engineering directories, trade bodies, and relevant industry publications, restoring the domain authority the migration had destroyed and building beyond the previous baseline.
✏
Content Creation & Optimisation
Identified gaps in the existing content strategy, service areas, technical specialisms, and location-based pages the site had never targeted. Wrote and optimised 15+ new pages covering the company’s full range of engineering services, each built around specific search intent and structured with proper heading hierarchy, internal linking, and FAQ schema where relevant.
📈
On-Page SEO & Schema Markup
Rewrote all title tags and meta descriptions across the site. Implemented structured data including LocalBusiness, Service, and BreadcrumbList schema to improve rich result eligibility. Established a clear internal linking structure between service pages, case studies, and location pages to distribute authority effectively throughout the site.
The Results
10× Organic Clicks. Recovered Authority. Rankings Beyond the Original Baseline.
The recovery was methodical and the results compounded over time. As the technical issues were resolved and Google reindexed the properly redirected pages, rankings began to return. New content and backlinks then pushed the site beyond where it had been before the migration, turning a damaging mistake into an opportunity to build a stronger SEO foundation than ever existed before.
✓ Organic clicks grew from 30 to 300+ per month
A 10× increase in monthly organic search clicks measured in Google Search Console, driven by recovered rankings and entirely new keyword positions the site had never held before
✓ All backlink equity restored via comprehensive 301 redirect mapping
Every referring domain previously pointing to broken URLs now passes its authority to the correct live page, eliminating the equity loss caused by the broken migration
✓ Google Search Console errors reduced from 30+ to zero
A clean crawl profile with no 404s, no duplicate content issues, a properly structured sitemap, and correct canonical implementation across the entire site
✓ 15+ new service and location pages ranking for previously untargeted terms
New content targeting specific engineering services and geographic markets opened entirely new ranking opportunities, driving traffic the site had never received even before the migration
✓ New backlinks from Irish engineering directories and trade publications
Targeted outreach built a stronger, more relevant backlink profile than the site had before the migration, turning the recovery into a net improvement in domain authority
“We had no idea the developers hadn’t set up the redirects. By the time we noticed the traffic drop, the damage was already done. Jan came in, explained exactly what had happened, and fixed it properly. The results have gone well beyond what we had before.”
Engineering Services Company, Ireland
Had a Site Migration? Worried About Rankings?
Site migrations are one of the most common causes of sudden ranking drops. Whether it’s already happened or you’re planning a redesign, a technical SEO audit from Jan Smolorz will identify exactly what’s at risk, before or after the damage is done.