A website can spend months paying for SEO while the wrong tactics quietly create problems that eventually catch up with it.
Sometimes, the first step isn't building more.
It's cleaning up what shouldn't have been there in the first place.
This isn't to say that long-term SEO contracts are bad. SEO can absolutely require ongoing work.
But it does highlight something important:
The length of your SEO contract isn't the most important thing. Who is actually working on your website is.
The website recovered to its previous Google performance and also survived the latest Core Update.
The interesting part?
We didn't lock the client into a 6-month or 12-month contract.
The core recovery work was completed in one month.
Several other technical and SEO issues were affecting the site's trust and relevance
Instead of trying to "build more backlinks" or add more content, we focused on cleaning up the problems first.
We created a recovery strategy and started fixing the issues one by one β removing harmful elements, correcting the technical implementation, improving the site's relevance, and making sure the website accurately represented the business.
And the result?