Recovered Traffic and AI Wins: A Brand-Saving Technical Audit

Background 

In July 2024, an Australian fine jewelry website partnered with The HOTH to improve their organic traffic and online visibility. 

After a few months, traffic and rankings were steadily improving. 

However, partway through the campaign, the client had several design changes made to their website. Unfortunately, these alterations caused their organic traffic to plummet. Previously, we had boosted it 10x. 

The culprit?

Technical SEO issues. 

Following a comprehensive audit, we successfully pinpointed and resolved all the technical complications. 

Our efforts restored the lost traffic and added 19 points to the client’s domain authority score. As a bonus, our fixes laid the technical foundation for improved AI search visibility. Because of this, the client gained a whopping 54 AI citations due to the technical cleanup. 

This client’s situation exemplifies how even a powerful SEO campaign can be decimated by hidden technical issues. Keep reading to learn how we were able to turn things around with a technical audit. 

The Challenge

At the time of working with us, the client wasn’t generating much traffic to their site. They were only averaging 65 visitors a month and had an incredibly low domain rating of 1. 

This posed a steep challenge for our SEO team, but we were ready to address it head-on. 

After 6 months, we were already seeing impressive results. 

We got their organic traffic up to 655 visitors per month (a 10x boost), and their domain rating was steadily increasing at 7. 

That’s when the bombshell hit. 

The client had some sitewide design changes made, and their search performance fell off a cliff. 

The adjustments caused unforeseen technical issues to emerge. As a result, their average visitors dropped from 655 to just 32. 

Something went seriously wrong, and the client had no way of knowing what was to blame.  

They also had serious concerns that their hard-earned traffic gains might be gone for good. After all, discovering that your website’s ability to generate leads and revenue has virtually disappeared is alarming, to put it mildly.  

Let’s be clear, this is not an uncommon thing to happen. 

There are hundreds of technical errors that can impact your search performance practically overnight, which is exactly why technical SEO is essential. 

Our team knew that a comprehensive technical audit was in order, so we got to work. 

The Strategy 

It didn’t take long for us to start uncovering the client’s issues. 

Here’s an abridged breakdown of what we found:

• Index bloat and cannibalization (#1 problem)

  The client had 4,000+ pages that were crawled, but not indexed. These pages contained thin, low-quality, and duplicate content, and Google refused to index them. This is a common phenomenon for e-commerce sites, as lots of pages will have duplicate content (like for different product colors and sizes). The problem was that this wasted the client’s crawl budget, causing Google to miss more important pages that drive leads and revenue.

  At the same time, these thin pages diluted the authority of the client’s highest-performing pages, which caused the severe ranking dropoff. The recommended fix was to properly use canonical tags (which fixed the duplicate page issue), noindex tags, and fix the URL generation process that was helping cause the problem. This restored the client’s authority so they could reclaim lost rankings and generate traffic from their target audience again.

• Severe crawlability barriers

  The site’s category pages used a ‘load more’ button. This is a problem because Googlebot can’t click buttons. As a result, most of the site’s inventory was hidden from Google. That meant important product pages weren’t ranked or indexed, rendering them invisible to customers. To fix this, we recommended the client use standard pagination (page 1, page 2, etc.), which crawlers can easily follow.

• Faulty site structure and navigation

  The client’s robots.txt file was causing redirect chains for over 85 URLs. The sitemap.xml file, AKA Googlebot’s roadmap, was also broken. A faulty sitemap is like giving Google a faulty GPS, and it causes the site’s link authority to not flow properly. We recommended that the client clean up the robots.txt directives and remove all non-existent or unused URLs from the sitemap. Proper site structure and navigation are necessary for strong rankings and a positive customer experience.

• Widespread on-page duplication

  Once again, duplicate content is an extremely common problem for e-commerce sites. We found 72 pages with duplicate headers, 35 with duplicate titles, and countless others with identical meta descriptions. Because Google ignored these duplicate pages, customers weren’t finding the products they wanted. Our recommended fix was to consolidate product variations (canonical tags) and give the rest of the pages unique content.

The Results 

After the technical audit fixes were implemented, the client’s site recovered its lost traffic and soared to new heights in AI search. 

We got the average monthly visitors back up to 592, and the client’s domain rating improved by 19 points. This is a significant increase in authority, and definitely contributed to the boost in AI search visibility. 

Speaking of AI, the client’s site was invisible to AI tools at the beginning of our campaign. The technical issues were significant enough that they formed a brick wall between the client’s site and its content. The strong technical foundation we established paved the way for 54 new AI citations. 

Here’s a summary of the results:

• Overall, the client saw a 1,750+ increase in organic traffic (recovered from a 95% collapse) 

• Domain rating grew from 1 to 20 

• 3 appearances in Google’s AI Overviews 

• 27 ChatGPT citations 

• 24 Perplexity citations 

This case demonstrates that you need a solid technical foundation to perform well in today’s search results and the AI-driven information ecosystem of tomorrow. 

The Proof 

Here’s the client’s traffic when they first began working with us in July 2024:

As you can see, they were only receiving 65 visitors per month. As of February 2nd, 2025, we were seeing great improvements to their organic traffic:

At 655 visitors per month, we achieved a perfect 10x increase. Their domain rating was also on its way up. 

The technical issues began in March. By April, their traffic had plummeted to just 32 monthly visitors:

The good news is it didn’t take long for the client to course correct after they implemented our fixes. By August, their organic traffic had all but recovered, and their Domain Rating grew to 20:

Here’s the client’s AI wins:

They received a healthy number of citations from ChatGPT and Perplexity while establishing a foothold in Google’s AI Overviews. 

Want to Improve Your Visibility on Google and AI Search Tools?

Sign up for a Technical Audit now to ensure your site is in fitting shape to perform well on Google and AI-driven platforms like ChatGPT. 

Also, don’t wait to try out our AI Discovery service to boost your brand’s visibility on AI search tools.   

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