Recovery audit
€690
fixed price, ten working days
- Prioritised damage list
- Recoverability assessed per item
- The basis for scoping the repair
SEO recovery after lost rankings and traffic Diagnosis first, then the repair.
Visibility gone after a relaunch, migration or agency change. We isolate the cause, prioritise the critical pages and rebuild in a controlled way.
Five steps from diagnosis to recovery.
A drop is not bad luck. It is a pattern with a cause that can be diagnosed.
Recovery audit
Which URLs are dead, which ranked before, where redirects are missing, which content and signals were removed. Matched against Search Console data and older crawls.
Stabilise
Every old URL that ranked or is linked to gets its redirect to a fitting target retroactively. No blanket redirect to the homepage, which counts as a soft 404.
Remove blockers
Forgotten noindex rules left over from staging, broken robots directives, canonical loops. Invisible in the browser, fatal in the index.
Reconstruct
Ranking content and the wording that carried it come back. Schema, breadcrumbs and internal linking are restored or improved.
Re-indexing and monitoring
Sitemap resubmitted, indexing triggered, crawl and ranking behaviour watched through the first weeks. Progress becomes visible instead of guessed.
What diagnosis and repair cover.
The entry point is always the audit. The scope of the repair is set only afterwards.
Included in the recovery audit
- Comparison of dead and previously ranking URLs
- Gaps in the redirects
- Removed content and signals reconstructed
- Indexing blockers found
- Prioritised damage list with an assessment per item
In the implementation project
- Build and validate the redirect map
- Restore content and long-tail wording
- Repair schema, breadcrumbs and internal links
- Sitemap and re-indexing
- Crawl and ranking monitoring
- Transition into the ongoing retainer
Not included
- A guarantee that individual positions return
- A flat price before the diagnosis
- Blanket redirects to the homepage
- Buying links
How you know you have a recovery problem.
The symptoms at the start of almost every recovery case. They usually show up together.
Traffic collapsed
Far fewer organic visits, coinciding with an event: relaunch, migration, CMS switch, agency change. Pages that could reliably be found no longer show up.
Pages out of the index
Old URLs return 404, new ones get indexed slowly or not at all. Backlinks point into the void, and years of accumulated authority run past a dead address.
Rankings slipped
Money queries that sat on page one have fallen far back. Often because ranking content was cut, or schema and internal links were silently removed.
Enquiries dried up
The phone rings less, the form stays empty. The loss often shows up in sales first and in the report later. After an agency change it is also worth checking where the contact form actually sends its messages.
Typical causes: relaunch, migration, indexing, intent and content.
A handful of damage classes cover almost every 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 case and the most repairable one. How to avoid it in the first place is covered in the relaunch checklist.
Migration with broken signals
A domain move, hosting move or CMS switch where canonicals, hreflang or internal linking fell by the wayside. The pages are reachable, but Google reads them differently than before.
Indexing blockers
A single forgotten rule from the staging phase can take whole sections out of the index. Caught early, it is the fastest damage to repair.
Intent mismatch
Pages rank for the wrong terms, or several pages compete for the same query and push each other down. This often happens when pages are merged or recut during a rebuild.
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 from Search Console, web archives and old crawls which URLs, content and signals were lost.
What can be restored and what cannot.
The assessment is set per item in the damage list, before any budget goes into the repair.
Well recoverable
Losses from missing redirects, indexing blockers and removed signals, as long as the old content can be reconstructed and the damage is no older than a few months.
Partially recoverable
Rankings on deleted content whose backlinks still exist. The authority can be passed on with a redirect; the new page has to earn the position again.
Not plannable
Positions that depended mainly on a competitive field that has since changed. We flag these explicitly in the damage list so nobody budgets around them.
When a rebuild is faster
If technology, structure and content are all damaged at once, repairing piece by piece often costs more than a clean rebuild with a planned migration. In that case we recommend a relaunch with SEO migration, with the reasoning set out in the audit.
Diagnosis first, then repair or retainer.
Access needed: domain, hosting, Search Console. Nothing else.
SEO retainer after stabilising
from €990 / month
monthly, three months minimum
- So the rebuilt trend does not break again
- Technical work, content, internal links
- Reporting with Search Console data
Relaunch with SEO migration
from €3,900
fixed price, eight to twelve weeks
- When a rebuild is the better route
- Migration instead of redesign
- Ranking pages, URLs and signals migrated
Three signals that it does not fit.
Not every decline is a recovery case.
- Individual queries fluctuate while everything else holds. That is normal movement, not a reason for a project.
- Your relaunch is still ahead of you. Prevention is the cheaper route, and the migration belongs in the relaunch project.
- You want a guarantee that positions return. Positions that depended mainly on the competitive field are something nobody can promise back.
Further reading.
- Traffic drop after a website relaunch: find the cause and win your rankings backThe new site is live and impressions are falling. Before anyone starts changing redirects on a hunch: how to find the cause in five checks, tell a normal wobble from real damage, and repair things in the right order.
- Website relaunch and migration without avoidable ranking losses: the complete SEO checklistThe new site is prettier - and brings in less. That's not bad luck, it's a pattern. Here's why a relaunch costs rankings and how to plan one so your visibility survives the move.
- Switching SEO agency without losing rankings or dataSwitching SEO agencies is trickier than starting with one. Switch wrong and you lose access, data and rankings at once. Switch right and your rankings never notice. Here is the order that makes the difference.
Patrick SosathFounder of seosath, responsible for strategy, code and SEO
From the first call to the reporting you deal with the same person. No hand-off to a junior team, no account management in between.
Common questions about SEO recovery.
Will the rankings come back?
In most cases a large share of them, provided you act fast and the cause is isolated cleanly. Pages that have been out of the index for a long time and whose content was deleted do not necessarily return in full. The earlier recovery starts, the more can be saved.
How do I tell a real drop from normal fluctuation?
Three signals: the loss coincides with an event, it hits many pages at once rather than single terms, and it does not recover on its own after four to six weeks. If two apply, the diagnosis is worth it.
How is this different from relaunch support?
Relaunch support is prevention before the move. Recovery is repair afterwards. Both follow the same mechanics, but recovery starts with a diagnosis of the damage rather than a migration plan.
How fast will I see movement again?
Once the redirects are in place and Google recrawls, often within days to a few weeks. Full recovery follows re-indexing and typically takes weeks to months, depending on how long the damage persisted.
What does a recovery cost?
The entry point is always the recovery audit at a fixed €690 net. The scope of the repair is set afterwards, because it ranges from a few days to a partial rebuild depending on the damage.
Does this work if another agency caused the damage?
That is the most common case. We need no access to the previous agency, only to domain, hosting and Search Console. The inherited defects get documented factually.
Can we carry out the repair ourselves or with our agency?
Yes. The recovery audit is the entry point for every case, even if the implementation happens elsewhere. The damage list is sorted by priority and written so your team or your agency can work through it.
Send us the URL and roughly when the drop started.
We will tell you what is broken, what can be saved and whether a rebuild would be the faster route.
Reply within one working day. 60 to 75 minutes, €190, credited against your project fee.