If you’ve been told that SEO is dead in 2025, think again. Just look at the chart above, which highlights our client’s SEO issues and how our fixes affected their website impressions between 2024 and 2025.
As a marketing agency, we believe there’s no better way to understand SEO than by showing real-world data. In this article, we clear the air around SEO and walk you through our own SEO experience:
- What happened when nothing was done?
- The changes that were made.
- The results that followed.
Below, we will review a year’s worth of masked data to help you visualize the effects of ongoing SEO:
0. SEO Neglect: It’s More Common Than You Think
Let’s first begin by looking at what happens when you don’t actively manage your SEO.
For years, our client maintained strong on-page content but did nothing else: no link building, SEO maintenance, or technical audits. This situation is common among small businesses, where after launching their site, they see a brief bump in traffic, only to flatline later.
If you find yourself doing the same, your digital reach becomes limited to branded searches. Everything else, such as non-branded keywords, long-tail queries, and competitive topics, falls off the map.
Key takeaways: Search engines deprioritize inactive websites. Your reach and traffic will stagnate if you’re not actively working on SEO.
1. Planning and Strategy for a Killer SEO Program
Not identified in the above diagram was a comprehensive SEO audit to kickstart this SEO revitalization process. An audit revealed numerous site errors and insufficient content depth. If you’re unsure where to begin, an SEO audit is essential to map out what’s broken and what needs prioritizing.
As we delved deeper into the site, we uncovered additional technical SEO issues that had been silently impacting performance. The first was to address redirects.
2. Let’s Fix Redirects (Part 1)
The biggest issue that we uncovered was the existence of four duplicate versions of their site:
- A direct IP address
- A staging subdomain
- An HTTP version
- A trailing slash
The issue? Search engines split the site’s SEO across these URLs. Therefore, pages weren’t consolidated under a single domain, which meant no URL received the full SEO value.
To fix this, we implemented server redirects, 301 redirects, no-index, and updated canonical URLs to consolidate everything under the primary domain:
IPs, subdomains, HTTP, and trailing slash all point to https://domain.com
The impact: 100% increase in impressions to the primary domain.
Lesson learned: Never allow duplicate site versions to coexist. Redirect them and ensure one clean, secure domain is consistently used across the web.
3. Cleaning Up Indexing Errors
Once redirects were in place, we noticed indexing issues plaguing their site. Google Search Console identified several problems:
- 404 errors: Pages that needed proper redirects.
- Duplicate content: Incorrect or missing canonical tags.
- Discovered but not indexed: Thin or low-quality pages requiring content improvements.
- Redirect errors: Pages pointing to broken or non-existent destinations.
We used technical SEO tools, Moz and Semrush to monitor, fix, and resubmit the affected pages.
The impact: 100% increase in impressions.
Lesson learned: Indexing issues can quietly prevent important pages from appearing in search results. Fix them before focusing on publishing new content.
4. Kickoff Content Marketing (Part 1)
With technical SEO under control, we turned to content marketing. For several months heading into 2025, we consistently published at least one high-quality article each week, targeting relevant keywords and user intent.
The results? Impressions really started to climb. The consistent publishing rhythm fueled organic growth across a wide range of long-tail queries. Note that Google indexing results took about 3 months to propagate, which is fairly standard.
The impact: 400% increase in impressions.
Lesson learned: Compared to technical SEO fixes, content creation is a stronger driver for growth. However, content creation cannot proceed if your website is full of technical SEO issues.
5. Let’s Fix Redirects (Part 2)
Despite our earlier fixes, different indexing problems emerged:
- The IP address was still indexed. We scanned all their links and found a few deprecated links (no longer in use) in their internal links. Then we updated all internal links and canonical references to remove any trace of them.
- The staging site was still being indexed. We corrected the meta directives to noindex, nofollow on staging pages.
Once these were corrected, only a single, consistent domain appeared in search results, which is exactly how it should be!
The impact: 200% increase in impressions.
Lesson learned: Continuously monitor Google Search Console and confirm that only the correct domain is being indexed.
6. Content Marketing (Part 2)
We doubled down on content marketing again. The commitment to consistent, high-value publishing paid off when we switched to releasing 3+ articles each week. In just a few months, organic impressions skyrocketed!
The impact: 300% increase in impressions.
Lesson learned: SEO rewards persistence. Regularly updated, well-structured content is a key to long-term success.
7. Fixing Pagination
Through our ongoing maintenance, we noticed a sudden drop in impressions. We found that older articles were no longer accessible because the archived pages had broken pagination.
When paginated links are missing or broken, it can “orphan” older posts, making them impossible for search engine crawlers to find.
To resolve the pagination issues, we followed pagination best practices by fixing the pagination and resubmitting the sitemap.
The impact: Impressions went back to their previous levels.
Lesson learned: Ensure all content remains accessible to crawlers. Pagination is a critical piece of your site’s information architecture, so make sure it works.
8. Ongoing Content Marketing
This is the current snapshot of where we are with their SEO program. We know things are working, and we are continuing our aggressive content marketing campaign.
Our Guiding Light:
Impressions are up 5,000% over a span of a year! We couldn’t be more thrilled about this.
The Bottom Line / TLDR
SEO is very alive and well.
If you neglect your site as our client did, it will stagnate or may even decline. But results will surely follow when you address technical SEO issues, clean up indexing, and invest in content marketing.
Here’s what you should take away from our analysis:
- Start with a comprehensive SEO audit
- Fix redirects and eliminate duplicate domains
- Resolve indexing issues via Google Search Console
- Build and execute a consistent content marketing strategy
- Ensure paginated content remains crawlable
- Monitor results and stay persistent
- SEO is an ongoing effort
Whether you’re a small business or a large enterprise, the takeaways are still the same.
Need help with SEO and AEO? Contact an SEO expert like Uplancer for a free consultation and audit of your website today!
