A leading ecommerce eyewear retailer who had invested years building powerful visibility for highly competitive keywords including “reading glasses”, a search term with approximately 18,100 monthly UK searches, came to us after an unexpected website migration from non-www to www URL structures caused a sharp drop in keyword rankings, website traffic, and organic visibility.
Faced with the need for a substantial SEO recovery, our team quickly mapped out a targeted campaign focused on restoring rankings, rebuilding authority, and recovering commercial performance as quickly as possible.
Case Study Overview
- The campaign ran between 2020 and 2026 through ongoing Link Building, Blogger Outreach, and SEO migration recovery support.
- The website grew from 13 referring domains to 424 referring domains, representing an increase of 411 domains.
- Top 3 keyword rankings increased from 42 to 126, delivering 200% growth.
- The search term “reading glasses” keyword landing page increased organic sessions from 59 to 1,155, representing 1,857% growth.
- Organic traffic value for the “Reading Glasses” page increased from $26 to $514, marking 1,877% growth.
- Website-wide organic traffic value increased from $210 to $2,860, delivering 1,262% growth.
- Just 5 months after the client’s migration, the “reading glasses” keyword landing page exceeded its pre-migration traffic and traffic value levels.
The Challenge: Recovering Organic Performance After a Migration Issue
The client independently migrated the website from non-www to www URLs without prior SEO consultation. This led to search engines treating every URL as a unique identifier with no historical authority attached to them.
As a direct result, the client experienced a significant drop in crucial keyword rankings which severely impacted website visits and conversions. The issue was compounded further by several technical SEO problems identified during the post-migration audit, including outdated XML sitemaps, incorrect internal linking, redirect-related crawl inefficiencies, and robots.txt configuration issues.
Campaign Results & SEO Recovery Wins
- Referring domain growth: The website grew from just 13 referring domains at the start of the campaign to 424 referring domains by April 2026.
- Top 3 keyword ranking growth: The number of keywords ranking within Google’s top 3 positions increased from 42 to 126, representing 200% growth in highly visible ranking positions.
- “reading glasses” traffic growth: The client’s most commercially important page increased from approximately 59 organic sessions at the beginning of the campaign to 1,155 organic sessions by March 2026, representing 1,857% growth despite the URL migration disruption.
- Traffic value growth: Organic traffic value for the “reading glasses” page increased from $26 to $514, while total website traffic value increased from $210 to $2,860 over the duration of the campaign.
- Migration recovery success: Following the migration-related traffic collapse in late 2025, the website’s core “reading glasses” keyword ranked page recovered rapidly through technical SEO fixes, backlink redirection, content optimisation, and continued authority building. Within just 5 months, the page exceeded its pre-migration traffic and traffic value performance levels.
- Commercial keyword recovery: By April 2026, the website ranked at position 6 in Google for the keyword “Reading Glasses” and position 4 for “reading glasses for men”, demonstrating strong recovery across commercially valuable search terms.
Recovery Performance: 5 Months Later
The pace of recovery became one of the campaign’s most significant achievements.
By April 2026, just 5 months after the migration was completed:
- The “reading glasses” keyword landing page generated approximately 8,881 organic sessions.
- Organic traffic value reached $3,568.
- The page ranked for 189 keywords.
- 51 keywords ranked within Google’s top 10 positions.
- 5 keywords ranked within Google’s top 3 positions.
Most importantly, the brand regained first-page visibility for the primary target keyword “reading glasses”, proving that Google was once again recognising the brand and associated webpage as a trusted and authoritative result.
Results at the start of the campaign: March 2020.
Results Comparison: March 2026.
Final Thoughts & Next Steps
Recovering from a full-site SEO migration without prior planning is one of the most challenging situations an ecommerce website can face, particularly within a highly competitive retail market.
The next phase of the campaign will focus on continuing to strengthen authority signals, expanding keyword visibility further, and building additional high-quality backlinks to further support long-term organic growth across the ecommerce market.
Book a call with our team today and discover how we can help you take your business to the next level!
