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CASE STUDY · ECOMMERCE · TECHNICAL SEO
How Harbor Goods recovered 58% of lost revenue after a replatform
Harbor Goods moved to a new storefront and lost more than half their organic revenue overnight. We came in as their fractional SEO, traced every broken signal, and rebuilt the technical foundation until organic revenue passed its pre-migration peak.
58
%
Lost revenue recovered
+142
%
Organic sessions
4.6
×
Return on retainer
7
mo
To full recovery
THE CLIENT
Who we partnered with
Harbor Goods is a direct-to-consumer home and outdoor brand with a 4,200-SKU catalogue and a decade of organic search equity behind it.
A platform migration was meant to speed the store up. Instead it quietly severed the URL structure, and organic revenue fell off a cliff in the space of a fortnight.
CLIENT SNAPSHOT
INDUSTRY
Ecommerce · Home & Outdoor
PLATFORM
Shopify Plus
CATALOGUE
4,200 SKUs
ENGAGEMENT
Fractional SEO · 7 months
THE CHALLENGE
A replatform wiped out years of organic equity
The migration shipped without a redirect map. Thousands of category and product URLs returned 404s, and the crawlers that had indexed Harbor Goods for ten years started dropping pages by the day.
Internally nobody could say which URLs had existed before, because the old sitemap had gone with the old platform. Revenue reporting showed the damage but not the cause.
They did not need an audit telling them something was wrong — they needed someone who could reconstruct the old URL set, prove which pages mattered, and get the fixes shipped inside a busy engineering sprint.
THE APPROACH
Four moves that rebuilt the foundation
No ninety-page audit. Four fixes, in the order that brought revenue back fastest.
1
Reconstructed the old URL map from archives
With the old sitemap gone, we rebuilt the pre-migration URL set from crawl archives, server logs and analytics exports — then verified every one against historic revenue.
2
Shipped a redirect map engineering could deploy
We handed over a clean, tested redirect file rather than a spreadsheet of suggestions — mapped old URL to new, deduplicated, and ordered so the highest-value pages went first.
3
Rebuilt category pages as real landing pages
The new category templates were thin. We rebuilt the top 40 as genuine landing pages — buying guides, sizing help, and the comparison content shoppers actually search for.
4
Prioritised by revenue, not by traffic
We ranked every broken URL by the revenue it used to earn, not by sessions. That put a handful of unglamorous category pages at the top of the queue — and they carried most of the recovery.
THE RESULTS
Organic revenue past its pre-migration peak
Seven months after the migration, Harbor Goods was earning more from organic search than it had before the replatform. Every number below is measured against the post-migration low.
58%
Lost revenue recovered
within 7 months
+142%
Organic sessions
vs. post-migration low
4.6×
Return on retainer
measured on organic revenue
+61
Categories on page one
from near zero
The numbers, visualized
Use the arrows to move through the charts.
Organic revenue by month
Indexed organic revenue since the migration
0
200
400
600
800
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Indexed pages: before vs after
Pages in the index, by quarter
589282781046412652Q1Q2Q3Q4Organic searchPaid ads
Where organic revenue comes from
Share of organic revenue by page type
Recovered categories
Top categories back on page one
GilbertPhoenixTempeMesaChandlerScottsdale586152443932
Why recovery was faster than a rebuild
Recovering the redirects returned the link equity that a decade of organic growth had built. Once those signals pointed at live URLs again, rankings came back far faster than starting from scratch would have allowed.
Why revenue overtook the old peak
Fixing the foundation exposed how thin the old category pages had always been. Rebuilding them did not just restore what was lost — it opened up commercial queries the old store had never ranked for at all.
MORE PROOF
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WHAT CLIENTS SAY
Senior help they feel every single week
“
We had lost half our organic revenue and nobody could tell us why. Having one senior SEO actually in our tools every week changed everything — revenue recovered faster than we forecast.
ME
Marcus Ellery
Founder, Harbor Goods
“
They operate like a senior member of our team, not an outside vendor. Within two quarters organic became our most efficient acquisition channel.
SN
Sarah Nolan
Head of Growth, Series-B SaaS
“
They didn’t hand us a strategy deck and disappear. Our fractional SEO was in our standups every week, shipping alongside the team.
DR
Dana Reyes
Marketing Director, Peak Comfort HVAC
“
Lost organic revenue after a migration?
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