-
Joined an agency with a failing site
Posted by on May 4, 2026 at 3:45 amSo background and sorry if I am jumping around everywhere. So I joined a company in March and I was given a client that has dropped 70-80% of their traffic since April 2025. September 2025 was a major drop (30%) due to core updates, and the Dec-Jan26 was their biggest drop from the core update as well. I came in believing it was a site health issue, we improved indexing reports on GSC, improved permalinks, etc. nothing so far. They have basically 3 of the same pages
1. /service/
2. /miami/service/
3. /es/service/ (I’ll get to this in the next part)They have a plugin (weglot) that duplicates a page to translate to Spanish. A new URL gets created with /es/ in it, I’ve never heard of this. I’ve only heard of a button on the top of a browser to translate. I noticed the plugin is used by picking and choosing the pages you want to translate so by nature the client picked only service pages to translate not the entire site so there isn’t so much bloat and crawl budget waste. Again never heard of such a thing. I also noticed they don’t have an ‘x-default’ href tag either. The Spanish pages are basically invisible now.
We also added so many redirects because the index report was giving us so many 404s, crawled no indexed pages that shouldn’t be crawled, and added disallow in the robots.txt.
We currently see indexed pages dropping, a bit of a rise in crawl stats but traffic is still way down. I should also mention, around April 2025 when the traffic peaked is when their marketing person recreated a new design on elementor which consisted of a lot more (relevant) information but using strictly AI. I tried to let the client know of the time frame (coincidence) that happened but refuses to acknowledge it and just wants to get traffic back to where it was. Every single page traffic fell exactly the same pattern no matter what it was. I can’t seem to find a culprit or a solution to begin seeing any improvements.
I also been updating their location service pages as well (not exactly unique but pretty unique with their links, headings, and certain content.) it’s been about 4-5 weeks and nothing has changed. I know it’s still early to see major results but client is well getting impatient and as someone who recently joined the company it may look bad on my end if I don’t savage their site.
Would love any insight, feedback, questions, that can maybe help restructure my perspective on their site.
-
1 Reply
-
Obligatory notes: you are not impacted by crawl budget; this is partly a page authority problem; and also you should avoid blaming downside on core updates, it will always make you look worse (“sorry, I have no control” is not what clients want to hear.)
Okay. Now that that’s out of the way. From what I’m reading (a) you need some hreflang tags on those geo variants asap, (b) it sounds like this is less about algo changes and more about them killing pages or making updates with no consideration to impact and (c) intent-overlapping pages + low authority
What doesn’t really make sense is *every single page falling in the exact same pattern. Seems like there is more there. Is that all traffic? Organic-search attributable only? Are you certain it’s not Bot activity, etc?
You start this investigation by determining if SQL/Pipeline was impacted, and moving backwards to support/optimize pages that drive the most lead flow (read: quality MQL volume)
But in an agency role, I know you might not actually be equipped to do that, so, maybe recommend hreflang tags and give the point of contact a loving kiss on the forehead
-
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
-
[removed]
Log in to reply.