Starting position
A US-focused brand whose commercial organic footprint had weakened. From late 2022, the priority was the top-3 positions for commercial and transactional keywords (measured monthly, not annually), which sat well below the brand’s potential.
Algorithmic context
Recovery window: from ~October 2022, multi-year. Rebuilt across successive cycles: December 2022 link spam, October 2023 spam, March 2024 core + spam, the 2024 core cycle, and the 2025 core updates.
What we diagnosed and rebuilt
| Signal / update type | What we found | What we did |
|---|---|---|
| Link spam (Dec 2022, Oct 2023) | Legacy link/anchor risk | Two-stage backlink audit + disavow; anchor cleanup |
| March 2024 core + spam | Scaled/thin content & site-reputation exposure | Content quality overhaul, pruning, site-reputation cleanup |
| Core cycle (2024–2025) | Fragmented architecture, weak topical authority | Category/URL architecture, topical clusters, internal linking, entity signals |
Outcome
- Organic traffic now ~100K/month
- Top-3 commercial/transactional keywords grew from ~4.5K to nearly ~12K — an all-time high
- Google Ads spend reduced as organic carried demand
Representative recovery scenario, modeled on real organic-visibility data. Brand identities and exact figures are withheld for confidentiality; individual results vary with each site’s history, market, and technical condition.