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Everyone talks about the successful projects, but no one talks about doing everything right but still failing
Posted by on January 21, 2026 at 9:49 amSo, I onboarded this client ~4 months ago ( Sep ). SaaS product, with medium visibility ( think ~15-20k/day but declining & okaish authority ). I won't go into details about what was wrong, but given the needs we settled on to 3 updates a week.
Since then, we
– got them organic backlinks highly relevant to their niche ( some of the biggest companies in their niche now rank back to them )
– TOFU/MOFU/BOFU content ( highly relevant keywords)( some of the "competitor" alternatives blog was rejected by them citing they wanted to focus more on the technical guides )
– Meta/H1/H2, internal linking and many other technical fixes.
– Parasites
– and i can list on & on
During this duration, they migrated the site from one hosting provider to another, completely redisgned/re-wrote the copy of their entire website.
The traffic was stagnant with a few spikes here and there till Dec, but the traffic started improving/the pages we made changes too started picking up after the core update – but as for the leads… well, they have been stagnant too.
Not sure where things went wrong, but i believe they will be stopping the collaboration ig.
Not ranting, but take this as a lesson; that this field is not all rainbow and sunshine. Sometimes things will be opposite of what you expect them to be.
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1 Reply
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this is the part nobody likes to talk about. you can do solid work, fix real issues, and still lose because the variables you do not control move underneath you. migrations and full copy rewrites alone can reset momentum for months, even if everything else is right. traffic moving without leads is also a reminder that seo can solve visibility but not product market fit or conversion gaps. it sucks, but this does not read like bad execution to me. it reads like timing, expectations, and too many moving pieces colliding at once.
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There’s several posts here where people say they done everything right, but the harsh reality is that you might just think you’ve done everything right.
How niche is the niche? Even though the biggest companies link back due they have authority themselves?
If have done everything correctly and ranking first, could it be due to seasonality or you’re targeting keywords which get no traffic?
Otherwise it could be that migration wasn’t properly handled or if you got penalised this could make it hard to hard to get back up rankings.
Either way, it’s always a learning experience.
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This is more common than people admit. You can do solid SEO work and still lose if the product side is shifting under you. A full redesign, copy rewrite, and hosting move mid-cycle can wipe out signal and conversion context even if rankings recover. Also, worth separating traffic growth from lead quality. I’ve seen plenty of cases where SEO works, but the pages attract the wrong intent after changes. If leads stayed flat, it’s often positioning, offering clarity, or post-click flow, not rankings. Sucks, but it doesn’t mean the work was wrong. It just means SEO was only one variable in a messy system.
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>medium visibility ( think ~15-20k/day but declining & okaish authority )
What does visibility mean? 15-20k/day? That is impressions or clicks?
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honestly.. this is an uncomfortable truth in SEO that does not get talked about enough. You can execute well and still lose if timing, product fit, or conversion fundamentals are off. Traffic moving without leads often means the bottleneck is outside search, not effort or skill. It does not invalidate the work, but clients usually judge outcomes, not process, which is a hard lesson most of us learn the long way.
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1) migrating while you are trying to prove results is a major issue.
2) the saas companies I work with are seeing LLMs take over their traffic which is killing organic
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