SEO Organic Traffic Recovery Case Study: How We Restored Organic Traffic After Platform Migration Quickly
An online retailer of new and remanufactured gym equipment moved from Volusion to Shopify in May 2025. Daily clicks fell from roughly 1,200 to 500. By late August, after host rollback and technical fixes, Search Console showed clicks and impressions rising steadily again.
Average daily clicks fell from 1,200 to 500 after the move.
Unplanned migration changes caused host mix-ups, broken or missing redirects, indexing blocks, on-page and content parity gaps, and slower pages. Rankings and equity scattered across two hosts.
The brief: revive organic traffic by fixing the technical issues and consolidating every signal on the correct host.
Where the platform migration went wrong
During the platform switch, several critical mistakes disrupted how search engines crawled, indexed, and ranked the site.
- Moved from www to the non-www host by mistake, causing a sharp drop in clicks and impressions
- Created long redirect chains and missed critical 301 mappings from top Volusion URLs
- Left staging noindex in production with poorly optimised robots and indexing directives
- Kept an old sitemap listing 404s and non-canonical URLs, sending Google mixed signals
- Weak internal linking, reducing crawl depth and equity flow
- Shopify apps added JS bloat, hurting LCP and CLS
- Lost content parity: titles, descriptions, H1s, and copy didn't match Volusion versions
- Under-implemented structured data on product, collection, homepage, and generic templates
How we turned it around
We fixed the core SEO foundations by resolving host issues, adding clean 301s, resolving indexation and sitemap errors, restoring content and on-page signal areas, improving structured data, and improving site speed, among other things.
Host rollback and redirect map
Rolled back to the correct www host, built a clean 301 redirect map starting with top-performing pages, and removed redirect chains.
Full technical audit
Ran a complete audit with Screaming Frog and Ahrefs. Cleaned up 404s, fixed redirects, and rebuilt an optimised robots.txt.
Indexation recovery
Audited Google Search Console, resolved indexation issues, and submitted sitemaps that reflect canonical URLs only.
Content parity restored
Segment-based on-page audits across collections, products, blogs, and generic pages. Restored titles, descriptions, H1s, and key copy to match high-performing Volusion versions.
Speed and Core Web Vitals
Reduced app bloat and addressed LCP and CLS to lift page experience across templates.
Structured data at scale
Implemented advanced schema markup for product, collection, homepage, and other page types.
Clicks, impressions, and indexation climbing again
Clicks and impressions dropped sharply in early June and stayed suppressed for weeks. After the www rollback, a proper 301 redirect map, and chain cleanup, both climbed steadily through late August as equity consolidated back to the primary domain.
Indexation restored on www. Indexed pages rose from near zero to roughly 4.65K by 13 September after clean sitemaps and canonicals prompted Google to recrawl and reindex.
The Top Pages view shows the www host re-indexing and traffic recovering, in line with the rollback, direct 301 mapping, chain cleanup, and schema and indexation fixes.
Product snippet validity climbed to 5.31K valid items with zero critical issues, supporting rich results across the catalogue.
Planning a migration, or recovering from one?
Book a strategy call and get a clear view of the host, redirect, indexation, and content-parity gaps limiting your recovery.