SEO Audit · Australia
Traffic recovery after a botched replatform of a subscription site
A fixed-price audit found the redirect and canonical failures behind a 58% traffic drop. Recovery to above the pre-migration baseline in ten weeks.
Outcomes
Measured against the pre-engagement baseline. Specifics verifiable on a call under NDA.
The challenge
Where the operator started and what actually made it hard.
The previous supplier had shipped a replatform with no redirect map. Old URLs returned 404s, new templates carried the wrong canonicals, and the age gate had been wired in a way that hid every page from crawlers. The operator was told it was the gate; it was mostly everything else.
The brief was a diagnosis before a retainer. The fixed-price audit had to name the causes, rank them by impact, and give a roadmap the operator could take to anyone.
- Operator
- Australian subscription platform, replatformed by another supplier
- Starting point
- Organic traffic down 58% four weeks after launch; supplier blamed the age gate
- Brief
- Find the cause fast, fix what is fixable, and prove it with numbers
What we did
Everything below sat inside the retainer. No upsells mid-engagement.
Fixed-price audit: crawl, log-file analysis, index coverage and template review
Redirect map for 2,400 legacy URLs, shipped in two batches
Canonical and hreflang corrections across all templates
Age-gate rework so marketing and category pages are crawlable again
XML sitemap rebuild and staged resubmission
Weekly recovery report against the pre-migration baseline
How it went
Baseline recorded first, a written report every month, no surprises at the end.
-
1
Weeks 1–2
Audit
Full diagnosis delivered as a prioritised written report with a walkthrough call.
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2
Weeks 3–6
Fixes
Redirects, canonicals and age-gate rework shipped by our engineers, not handed back as recommendations.
-
3
Weeks 7–10
Recovery
Index coverage restored. Traffic passed the pre-migration baseline in week ten and kept climbing.
Compliance handled
Built in from the start, not retrofitted.
- Age assurance kept in place while crawl access to non-gated pages was restored
- Redirect and canonical work documented for the operator’s next supplier
Work involved
The disciplines and tools on the retainer.
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Every engagement anonymised. Every outcome verifiable on request under NDA.
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30-minute confidential consultation. Once a mutual NDA is signed we walk through the real timeline, stack decisions and the numbers behind the outcomes.
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