SEO Case Study: Heart of the Customer

Project Overview

Heart of the Customer (HoC) is a boutique, end-to-end customer experience consultancy that helps complex B2B organizations design, measure, and improve customer journeys to drive transformational growth. In 2023, they came to Peaceful Media with a troubling trend: organic search traffic had been declining for more than six months following a website redesign.

Despite HoC’s strong reputation and deep content library, the new site had not been built with SEO in mind, and their content strategy lacked a data-driven approach. By the time we engaged, monthly organic search traffic had fallen to around 1.1k sessions and was still sliding. Our task was clear: diagnose the issues, stabilize the decline, and rebuild organic search as a reliable growth channel.

Challenge

The reason for the downtrend was in two parts:

HoC had redesigned its website, but the developer had paid no mind to technical SEO best practices when designing the new site structure.
Existing and new content was written without SEO best practices and data-driven decision-making.

By the time Peaceful Media started implementing the SEO solutions outlined below, monthly organic search traffic had dropped to 1.1k sessions, causing a major disruption in lead flow.

Plan

We started with a comprehensive SEO audit to identify the technical, structural, and content-related issues created or exposed by the redesign. Two primary problems emerged:

Technical foundations: The new site architecture overlooked SEO best practices—tag pages were indexed but poorly designed, legacy 404s persisted, and hundreds of orphaned pages created crawl waste and confusion.
Content strategy: Existing and new content had been created without keyword research or on-page optimization, meaning HoC wasn’t fully surfacing for the terms their ideal clients were actually searching.

From there, we developed and executed a plan in two main tracks:

Technical SEO Changes

Tag pages: Removed or de-indexed low-value WordPress tag pages that were previously indexed but not truly part of the user experience.
404 clean-up: Identified and pruned links to pages that no longer existed, reducing errors and improving crawl health.
Orphaned content: Evaluated 219 orphaned pages across the site; low-value, non-performing posts were set to draft for consolidation or retirement, tightening the site’s overall content footprint.

Keyword Research & Content Strategy

Keyword research: Identified priority topics and search terms aligned with HoC’s services, target industries, and thought leadership.
Optimize existing content: Rewrote and optimized 14 existing blog posts to align with target keywords, on-page SEO best practices, and clearer search intent.
New content guidance: Developed a forward-looking content plan and provided SEO guidelines so HoC’s internal team could write new posts in a way that reinforces and expands their organic footprint.

Results

Within four months of implementing the most critical technical fixes, HoC’s organic search traffic stopped declining and began to rebound. In October 2023, organic sessions had already doubled—representing a 100% increase from the low point at 1.1k sessions.

As optimized and new content began to mature in search results, that recovery accelerated, with more traffic flowing to service-aligned pages and strategic blog content instead of legacy, low-value URLs. The outcome wasn’t just “more traffic,” but better-qualified visitors who were actively searching for the kinds of CX strategy, journey mapping, and measurement expertise HoC provides.

Tech & Tools

While specific platform choices can vary, this type of SEO engagement typically involves:

Analytics & tracking: GA4 and search visibility tools to diagnose drops, monitor recovery, and measure page-level performance (including impression, click, and CTR trends from search).
SEO auditing & research: ahrefs and SEMrush for site audits, backlink and competitor analysis, and keyword research to prioritize high‑value opportunities.
On-page optimization: Yoast inside WordPress to standardize meta titles, descriptions, schema, and readability/keyword checks across existing and new content.
Marketing & CRM: HubSpot for capturing leads from organic traffic, tracking contact activity, and attributing form fills and opportunities back to SEO-driven sessions.
CMS (WordPress): Direct collaboration with HoC’s team to adjust page templates, update metadata, and implement the technical and content recommendations discovered through these tools.

Conclusion

This engagement is a textbook example of what can happen when you pair strong thought leadership with a solid SEO foundation. Heart of the Customer already had the expertise and case studies that B2B CX leaders needed; they just weren’t being surfaced effectively in search.

By cleaning up the technical debt from a well-intentioned redesign and aligning the content strategy with real search behavior, we turned a six‑month downtrend into a rapid recovery and a more durable growth channel. For B2B consultancies facing similar “mystery drops” in organic traffic after a redesign, this case shows how targeted SEO work can stabilize and then amplify the impact of your existing marketing investments.

Work With Us

Heart of the Customer