An SEO Comeback Story: How we recovered Sapphire Makeup & Hair's Website from a 90% Traffic Loss.

3214% increase

Organic visibility

Top 3 Rankings

Across commercial keywords

90% Recovery

Achieved from SEO to date

The Client

Sapphire Hair & Make-up are Australia’s #1 mobile hair and make-up service. They visit their clients and provide hair & make-up services for weddings, corporate events, school formals & photo shoots across all major cities. In addition to their hair and make-up service, Sapphire also have an ecommerce store that sells various hair and make-up products.

The Challenge

Before working with Engine Scout, Sapphire previously hired a so-called ‘reputable’ SEO agency that completely destroyed their organic rankings. Google had penalised their website for not following best practices and 90% of Sapphire’s customer leads had disappeared as a result.

Engine Scout were tasked with the goal of recovering Sapphire’s organic SEO traffic within a short time-frame as the client understandably had little trust in SEO agencies and didn’t want to commit to a longer term project.

The Strategy

From early discussions with the client, we knew that traffic from Google had previously been there #1 sources for leads and sales so it was vital we recovered the lost traffic as soon as possible.

Our SEO strategy focused on technical SEO corrections, great content & on-page optimisation:

SEO Recovery: Bring The Site Back

We quickly identified several key issues the previous SEO agency had failed to address including:

Search intent issues
Poor user experience signals
Thin content across key landing pages
Crawl budget & indexing issues
Broken links and keyword cannibalisation

Fixing the above problem areas right away ensured we quickly reversed the downward trend and started to climb back up to the first page of Google.

The Results

Since starting the campaign in February 2020, 80% of the website’s previous traffic has been recovered with an increase of 3214% since June 2020.

Note: Due to the current Global Pandemic, the clients traffic is still lower than expected but we expect this to bounce back as soon as Global conditions return to normal.

The site also ranks in the top 3 positions on Google for key commercial search terms and has regained 90% of it’s top 3 ranking prior to the Google penalty. Prior to our work, the client only had 4 keywords in the top 3 as of February 2020 which has now increased to 26 and represents a 550% improvement.

Based on the investment made, the recovery project has delivered exceptional results (90% recovery) in a short time-frame and the client’s business is poised to bounce back. We predict further growth as the local economy recovers and restrictions are relaxed further.