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You have a lot happening in a short time and they have heavy expectations.
Traffic across the board from everyone is down due to multiple Google Updates, Core Updates and the recent update that corrected inflated impressions for almost everyone.
There is also traffic loss across the board from AI Overviews and LLM inquiries.
Have you checked their most ranking pages to see when they were last updated, checked competition ranking, what gaps exist between them and your client?
Have you used the AI integration in Google Analytics yet? If you have access you can get data on your strongest pages, export their 3 month over 3 month GSC data and plug it into Claude and start having it analyze where you’re dropping, where the gaps are and which pages need updates.
Redirects and the technical updates you’re doing is solid, crawl budget doesn’t matter, Google’s not trying to save money on crawl…
If there are no penalties, how are core web vitals, and you mentioned a new Elementor implementation… does that mean they may have changed the site slug structure as well?
What was the reason for all the 404s, was it because of no proper 301s from old content? If that happened it could be a big loss from the time those pages went offline and you took over for the signal to be lost and nothing there to really redirect anymore.
But the biggest explanation to anyone’s site loss is AI overviews coming into play.
If their content is mostly AI, that’s a problem, if it’s all fluff, emdashes, and they got a temporary traffic bump from BS content they pushed out there and thought that was real abd valuable and now it doesn’t have that bounce anymore, Google doesn’t like it.
Also, what’s their Backlink structure and authority, do any of those mass AI pages have any good links to them, is the backlinking non-existent or slop? Do they have relevant fresh backlinks, doing videos on YouTube for brand relevance.
Are they local GBP business or National? Services Miami makes me think local business… so how are their reviews on Google, does their GBP and their locations and services match up and flow properly, proper map implementation, freshness signals there?
See how wide we can go? It can take a month or more to evaluate a client’s site and their competitors and test what’s going on. And you’re starting with someone who lost 80% without knowing really what was being done before hand.
Did you or your company make guarantees when they signed the client? And I’m betting the budget is pretty low? They may need to also supplement with Google Ads in the meantime to make up for the loss while you work to recover. Google ads can help with the ranking as well or to buy time while you fix everything that’s broken.
1. Major issue, AI taking traffic from everyone…
2. You know they loaded AI slop Google doesn’t like…
3. Many pages went to 404 sending worse signal to Google
4. Top pages from prior maybe never were updated…
5. Blogs don’t move the needle on local service business, properly written pages with real content do.
6. GBP needs solid regular reviews and consistent tie in to the site…
Hope some of this was helpful
