SEO recovery
SEO recovery for websites with lost rankings, traffic or enquiries.
After a relaunch, a migration, an agency change or years of drift: the visibility is gone, and nobody can say why. That is not bad luck, it is a pattern with a diagnosable cause: missing redirects, deleted content, removed signals, blocked indexation. Recovery starts with an honest diagnosis, not a promise. We isolate the cause, prioritise the critical pages and rebuild visibility in a controlled way.
How to tell
How you know you have a recovery problem.
Three symptoms that separate a real collapse from normal fluctuation. If two apply, the diagnosis is worth it.
Traffic collapsed
30 to 60 percent less organic traffic, coinciding with an event: relaunch, migration, CMS switch, agency change. Pages that ranked reliably can no longer be found.
Pages out of the index
Old URLs return 404, new ones get indexed slowly or not at all. Backlinks point into the void. Years of accumulated authority run past a dead address.
Rankings slipped
Money queries that sat on page one fell to page 3 to 8. Often because ranking content was cut, or schema and internal links were silently removed.
Causes
Typical causes: relaunch, migration, indexation, intent and content.
Five damage classes cover almost every recovery case. The diagnosis assigns yours instead of treating symptoms.
Relaunch without a migration plan
New URLs without redirects, deleted ranking content, removed schema markup. The most common and most repairable case.
Migration with broken signals
Domain move, hosting move or CMS switch where canonicals, hreflang or internal linking fell by the wayside.
Indexation blocks
Forgotten noindex locks from the staging phase, faulty robots rules, canonical loops. Invisible in the browser, fatal in the index.
Intent mismatch
Pages rank for the wrong terms, or several pages compete for the same query and push each other down.
Content erosion
Content that was cut, aged or diluted over years. Not a sudden collapse, but a creeping loss that eventually tips.
Inherited agency damage
The previous agency migrated without documenting anything. We reconstruct what was lost from Search Console, archives and crawls.
Process
The recovery diagnosis and the first sprints.
1 · Recovery audit
Fixed-price diagnosis in the first ten working days: which URLs are dead, which ranked before, where redirects are missing, which content and signals were removed. Cross-checked against Search Console data and, where available, old crawls. Result: a prioritised damage list with a recoverability rating per item.
2 · Stabilise
Every old, ranking or linked URL gets its 301 to the matching target, retroactively. No mass redirect to the homepage, Google treats that as a soft 404. Indexation blocks are removed before anything else happens.
3 · Reconstruct
Ranking content and long-tail wording that disappeared gets rebuilt. Schema, breadcrumbs and internal linking are restored or improved. Prioritised by what used to bring clicks, not by gut feeling.
4 · Re-indexation & monitoring
Sitemap resubmitted, indexation triggered, crawl and ranking trajectory monitored for the first weeks. Recovery progress becomes visible instead of guessed, and anomalies get fixed early.
Realistic expectations
What can be restored and what cannot.
- Well recoverable: losses from missing redirects, indexation blocks and removed signals, as long as the old content is reconstructable and the damage is not older than a few months.
- Partially recoverable: rankings on deleted content whose backlinks still exist. The authority can be redirected; the position has to be earned again.
- Not guaranteeable: positions that mainly depended on a competitive landscape that has since changed. Anyone selling a restoration guarantee here is selling a promise nobody can keep.
Cases and learnings
Real visibility trajectories, in both directions.
Rucker Elektro is the recovery case: inherited from a previous agency with missing redirects, GDPR risks and a top position that had dropped out of the index. Since the takeover in February 2026, monthly impressions grew from 2,440 to 30,193 and the average position improved from 27.2 to 8.9. All numbers from Search Console.
LION & LAND is the learning case, which we show just as openly: from February to May 2026 the average position improved from 50.8 to 10.0. Then the ongoing content work ended, and visibility began to decline. That is exactly what shows organic visibility is not a state but a trajectory that needs maintenance.
- Inherited damage at Rucker: ranking gone, no redirects, GDPR risk, the contact form pointed at the previous agency.
- Repair: redirect map retrofitted, indexation restored, content restructured by search intent, compliance fixed.
- Live test on the day of the new wallbox subsidy law: article indexed within 24 hours, four times the daily click average.
- No restoration guarantee. The proof is the documented trajectory, not a promise.
Formats
Recovery audit, implementation project or ongoing care.
- Recovery audit: fixed-price diagnosis with a prioritised damage list. The entry point for every case, even if the implementation happens elsewhere.
- Implementation project: we repair it ourselves, in prioritised sprints along the damage list. Scope and price are fixed after the audit.
- Ongoing care: after stabilisation as an SEO retainer, so the rebuilt trajectory does not break off again. Required access: domain, hosting, Search Console. Nothing more.
Is your relaunch still ahead of you? Then prevention is the better and cheaper route: website relaunch with SEO migration, before the damage happens.
FAQ
Common questions about ranking and traffic losses.
In most cases a large part, provided you act quickly and the cause is isolated cleanly. If old URLs are not dead for too long and content is reconstructable, redirects can be retrofitted and signals restored. Honestly: pages that dropped fully out of the index and whose content was deleted are not guaranteed to return 100 percent. The earlier the recovery starts, the more can be saved.
Three signals separate a real collapse from normal movement: the loss coincides with an event (relaunch, migration, CMS switch, agency change), it hits many pages at once rather than individual terms, and it does not recover on its own within four to six weeks. If two of those apply, the diagnosis is worth it.
The relaunch service is prevention: we accompany a planned move before it happens so nothing breaks. Recovery is damage repair: the loss has already happened, and we fix it retroactively. Both follow the same mechanics, but recovery starts with a diagnosis of the damage instead of a migration plan.
Once the redirects are in place and Google recrawls the site, things often move within days to a few weeks. Full recovery follows re-indexation and the re-evaluation of signals and typically takes several weeks to months, depending on how long the damage persisted. We set up crawl and indexation monitoring so the trajectory is visible instead of guessed.
The entry point is always a fixed-price recovery audit: we map what is broken, how big the damage is and what is recoverable. Only then is the scope of the actual repair fixed, because it ranges from a few days to a partial rebuild depending on the damage. No flat price for a problem we have not seen yet.
That is the most common case. We need no access to the previous agency, only to the domain, the hosting and Search Console. We document the inherited defects factually, without finger-pointing, and rebuild what can be rebuilt. For the Munich contractor Rucker Elektro, that was exactly the starting position.
Who leads the recovery
Patrick Sosath, founder & strategist.
Trained IT business specialist, Management & Technology at OTH Regensburg. Background in B2B software and IT systems.
A recovery is detective work at the interface of SEO and engineering. We run both sides, so redirect analysis and technical repair are decided from one hand. Exactly there, at the handover between SEO and development, is where the damage we fix gets created.
Lost visibility?
Send us the URL. We will tell you what is broken and what can be saved.
The entry point is a fixed-price recovery audit with a prioritised damage list. Honest framing included, even if the answer is that a rebuild makes more sense.
Get in touch
Send us a quick message.
Two-line brief, real reply within a working day. Or use the full enquiry form on the contact page.