Managed Service Provider SEO & Web Design Case Study

Phil Singleton

Phil Singleton is a Google Marketing and SEO expert in Kansas City. Contact Phil today for a free SEO strategy consultation.

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This example of an organic rankings collapse and SEO failure that happens all too often these days.

If you have recently hired a new digital agency, content marketing or branding company, you might want to have someone take a look at your SEO data to see what you have lost, and what may be holding you back from reaching potential in terms of website visibility and conversion rates.

This is the story of a Kansas City managed service provider that launched a new website in 2022 and promptly lost all of its visibility on Google search, that has had implications beyond SEO.

SEO is more than rankings.

SEO helps to calibrate all of your marketing together so you get a multiplier effect on your ROI.

And when your SEO falls apart, it’s indicative of fragmented or broken digital marketing strategy.

The Managed Service Provider SEO Problem

Even an established 10-digit revenue tech company with a decade or more of SEO equity can lose it all with a poorly executed rebrand or website rebuild.

This MSP experienced a significant drop in organic search traffic and rankings and to this date, may not realize why leads and conversions rates have fallen.

The Background

This Not a Client or Previous Client
This Company Did Approach Us a Couple Years Ago
Probably a $5M to $10M+ company in terms of annual revenues
New Website this Year – The CEO “Asked for Feedback” on LinkedIn
Not Trying to Throw Anyone Under the Bus (agency folks are my people and oh the irony of an SEO company provider critical feedback)
We have one of our own projects stuck in SEO and development purgatory, sometimes you’re at the mercy of your client
MSP SEO is close to our hearts – one of our most successful campaigns ever was an MSP (we love this niche!)
Motivation? Never Seen as Many SEO Crimes as I am seeing now (I’ve been in SEO for 20 years)

The Good

Their agency did some fantastic work!

Great website design
Beautiful creative
A new emphasis on social media
Video content strategy
Podcast launch

The Bad

However, while these were great improvements, the organic traffic and rankings were significantly impacted. In fact, the $20,000/month organic traffic value that the website once has crashed to $0.

As an SEO company, this is really discouraging.

Here are the highlights on what went wrong:

Completely Stripped Away Even Basic on-page SEO
Almost Looks Intentional (But it’s Not)
Lost All Meaningful Keyword Rankings
Lost Virtually All Traffic
Went from $20k in Organic Traffic Value to $0
Lost All Credibility on Google
Website Lost It’s Position as “Digital Center of Gravity”
Moved to a sh*tty premade WP theme (Agencies: please stop doing this!)

After analyzing the website and its current SEO situation, our team of managed service provider SEO professionals saw that all SEO, even the most basic aspects, had been taken away during the rebrand.

As a result, the company lost all credibility with search engines and lost rankings in the SERPs. As mentioned earlier, the free organic traffic this website value was worth $20,000 per month if they were to pay Google for ads.

This means that a website rebrand can be great for improving the user experience and providing creative content, but it’s important to remember that SEO is not only critical, but its the key tool for tying everything together.

While other marketing tactics, such as social media, podcasts, and video content, are important, your website should be the marketing hub of your business and referral point for all of your content.

The Managed Service Provider SEO Solution

While this look really bad, this company’s previous Google visibility is recoverable!

This is what they need to do:

Keep Design (But Not the Layout)

As mentioned, your website needs to be the referral source for all of your marketing. This includes having a great design and user experience, but it also SEO-friendly structure.

For a company this size, their new website should have been custom-built to ensure all website elements were SEO friendly. Instead, the it was built on a low cost, pre-made template which made it attractive and customizable, but an SEO disaster under the hood.

Salvage Old Site Data & Restructure the Website

The next step is to try and salvage any data from the old website and transfer it to the new website structure. This steps includes redirects, meta-data, blog posts, and more.

Once any valuable data is salvaged, a new site needed to be built from scratch. When building the site, there needs to be a focus on E-A-T, which stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trust.

The goal should be to create a website platform to publish and distribute content that solves problems, provides answers, educates and is authoritative on related subject matter in a way that draws trust signals, such as backlinks from authoritative websites and traffic from relevant users. Every page of the website should have a keyword-driven copy that is optimized for search engine crawling. This is vital as it is a part of Google’s algorithm to determine rankings in the SERPs.

De-Fragment Marketing Platform

The final step would be to take the fragmented marketing strategy and consolidate it into a cohesive plan. This would involve a science-based content calendar that considers all the marketing platforms, such as podcasts, video content, and blog posts.

By doing so, there will be a calculated marketing plan in place that is backed by data instead of guessing. This would allow the website to be focused on organic traffic, thus being a marketing hub and key referral source to all other marketing channels.

3 to 6-Month Ranking Recovery

With this strategy in place, a conservative timeline to recover the lost SEO rankings is 3-6 months. It could be sooner; however, it takes time to build authority, trust and gain recognition from Google. Remember, SEO is a marathon, not a sprint, so it is important to stick with the plan and have realistic expectations.

Nonetheless, this timeline is more than achievable; with consistency, traffic could surpass the old rankings and value.

Key Takeaways from this MSP SEO Case Study

It is important to plan ahead when making a website rebrand. SEO should be factored into the equation before starting any project, as organic traffic is integral to any business online.

Considering a Website Update or Rebrand?

When going to any type of marketing agency, have an SEO strategist with you in the room. It doesn’t matter if it’s any of these types of marketing companies:

SEO Agency
Creative Agency
Advertising Agency
Branding Agency
Content Marketing Agency
Influencer Agency
Industry Niche Agency

Get an SEO Person in the Room!

Whether it’s the agency’s own SEO strategist or one brought in to consult, the key is to make sure your website redesign is SEO-friendly with E-A-T in mind.

Not only will this save you time and money, but it will also mitigate the risks of losing organic traffic and rankings from a website rebrand.

Use Caution When Hiring a Social Media Company

Many companies are hiring social media agencies and social media influencers to try and emulate their social media success.

That’s like hiring Patrick Mahomes to coach your team. If you want true success, you should be looking to hire Any Reid.

Not only is it highly unlikely for you to achieve their visibility, the amount of time and effort you need to sustain vanity metrics is not sustainable, nor does it translate to maximum ROI for most companies.

Yes, social media is important, but it’s a tactic, not a strategy. More importantly it’s a distribution channel for your website content, not your primary publishing platform.

It’s true that vanity metrics, views, likes & “engagement” are misleading and intoxicating….

But you should focus on profitable growth, quality leads, and sales.

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