An online learning provider — traffic recovered after a six-month algorithmic decline.

The challenge

The client was an established online education provider who had built a strong organic search presence over several years. Over the course of six months spanning two Google core updates, they lost 40% of their organic traffic. The losses were concentrated on their high-intent course and programme pages — the pages that converted.

They had worked with another agency for 18 months prior who had been unable to diagnose or reverse the decline. By the time we were briefed, the client had lost significant revenue and was understandably frustrated with the lack of answers.

Our approach

Recovery work is the SEO discipline that most exposes the difference between a practitioner who has seen a lot of updates and one who hasn't. The presenting symptoms — traffic loss on content pages — can have a dozen different root causes, and treating the wrong one doesn't just fail to fix the problem; it can make it worse.

We started with a diagnostic-first approach: no recommendations until we understood what had actually happened.

Traffic pattern analysis. We mapped the traffic losses against Google's confirmed algorithm update dates and identified that the bulk of the decline correlated with the first of two updates — not the second, which suggested the second update hadn't found new problems but hadn't reversed the first either. This pointed away from a link penalty (which tends to compound with updates) and toward a content quality or EEAT signal issue.

Content audit. We audited the 200 pages that had lost the most visibility. The pattern was consistent: pages that had historically performed by being comprehensive now appeared thin relative to the new competitive landscape. The sector had seen a surge of expert-led content from university and professional body sources. The client's pages, written by content generalists, were losing the EEAT comparison.

EEAT gap analysis. We assessed the client's author and source credibility signals across the affected pages — author bios, credentials, citations, expert review. Almost none of the affected pages had any visible expertise signals. In a post-helpful-content landscape, for education content, this was a critical gap.

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The work

The programme had two tracks running simultaneously.

Content quality rebuilding. We prioritised the 40 highest-value pages by pre-decline revenue impact and rebuilt each one. This wasn't a light edit — many required structural rewrites, subject matter expert involvement, and new supporting content to build the topical authority around the core page. We worked with the client's in-house curriculum team to bring genuine expertise into the content.

EEAT signal implementation. We implemented an author bio and credentials framework across the entire site — not just the affected pages. Course pages now prominently feature the credentials of the instructors and the institutional accreditations of the programmes. Content review bylines identify the subject matter experts who validated the material. This was structural work that required template changes alongside content changes.

We also addressed a set of technical issues that the audit surfaced — not the cause of the decline, but friction that was preventing recovery: crawl issues on programme category pages, structured data errors on Course schema, and internal linking gaps that were leaving high-authority pages disconnected from the pages they should have been supporting.

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The outcome

Recovery is rarely linear. The first positive movement appeared at month three — incremental ranking improvements on mid-tier terms that confirmed the content work was being recognised. By month five, the affected pages had recovered to within 5% of their pre-decline traffic levels. By month seven, they exceeded the previous peak by 12%.

"We'd been told the traffic loss was irreversible without a major site overhaul. That wasn't the diagnosis we got from Position 1, and the outcome proved the diagnosis right."

The EEAT framework implemented during this engagement has since become part of the client's standard content production process. New courses are now built to this standard from day one.

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Related disciplines

This engagement draws on technical SEO, content strategy, EEAT improvement, and structured data. It is a good example of recovery work done properly — diagnosis first, targeted intervention, then patience while the algorithm catches up.