Case study
A new website made an established brand harder to find.
Leah Jay had more than three decades of property management experience and strong brand recognition. Then a website rebuild quietly damaged the foundations behind its non-brand search visibility. The brand had not lost relevance. Search had lost access to it.
The challenge
The rebuild had introduced problems across crawl depth, indexation, internal linking and performance. Pages that had previously accumulated visibility and authority were harder for search engines to reach and interpret. At the same time, the new content did not clearly express Leah Jay's specialist proposition to property investors.
The business still had the expertise and reputation customers wanted, but fewer non-brand searches were leading people to it. The immediate temptation could have been to publish more or push harder on paid media. That would have skipped the actual problem.
The website looked newer. Its search footprint got smaller.
- Crawl and indexation issues quietly stripping non-brand visibility
- Years of accumulated topical authority undercut by the new site's architecture
- Site speed and Core Web Vitals regressions from the rebuild's design choices
- Specialist investor services not communicated clearly in the new content
The result
Search recovered first. Then it became a stronger acquisition system than before.
Organic recovery and paid efficiency are different measures from different sources, so they are reported separately rather than as one combined result.
- +252%
- Organic traffic Baseline to peak · published case study
- +236%
- Top-3 ranking keywords Published case study
- −38%
- Google Ads cost per lead Published case study
The insight
Leah Jay did not need demand created from scratch. It needed its existing authority made discoverable again.
The rebuild had damaged the mechanics of discovery. But simply restoring the old site's performance would only have returned Leah Jay to where it had been.
Once the technical foundations were repaired, there was a second opportunity: organise the search programme around the people Leah Jay actually wanted to attract, property investors, rather than generic property management traffic. That changed the programme from recovery into growth.
The strategy
Repair the foundations. Rebuild around the investor. Add paid where intent is clearest.
- Repair before adding.The first job was unglamorous but necessary: fix crawl depth, indexation, internal linking and site performance so future work could compound instead of leaking through a damaged foundation. Some rankings returned as the technical problems stabilised. Others required the content work that followed.
- Make the investor the organising principle.Leah Jay's most commercially relevant audience was not anyone interested in real estate. It was property investors making specific decisions: choosing their first property manager, switching from an existing manager, building a larger portfolio, navigating tax, compliance and reporting, and understanding Newcastle and Hunter investment conditions. Content and service pages were rebuilt around those decisions.
- Use paid search where intent was explicit.Once organic visibility was recovering, we rebuilt Google Ads around two distinct buyer profiles: owners considering switching managers, and first-time investors choosing a property manager. Different intent meant different campaign architecture, messaging and landing experiences. Retail-tenant searches that consumed spend without contributing to the pipeline were excluded, helping reduce cost per lead by 38%.
Recovery to growth
Recovery came first. Growth was built on top of it.
- Website rebuildNon-brand visibility falls
- Technical recoveryCrawl · indexation · internal linking · performance
- Investor-focused search experienceContent · service pages · decision questions
- Paid captureOwners switching managers · first-time investors
- OutcomeMore organic traffic · lower paid cost per lead
What we did
Technical recovery. Repaired the crawl-depth, indexation, internal-linking and performance issues introduced by the rebuild, restoring a stable foundation for organic growth.
Investor search experience. Rebuilt content and service-page depth around the questions property investors actually ask when building portfolios, comparing managers or navigating ownership decisions.
Paid search. Separated the paid programme around the two buyer profiles most connected to the pipeline, with tighter query control and landing experiences designed around each intent.
Ongoing measurement. Tracked organic recovery, search visibility, leads and paid efficiency as separate but connected evidence of how the acquisition system was performing.
The takeaway
A website rebuild should not make a strong brand harder to discover.
Leah Jay's reputation was never the thing that needed rebuilding. The first job was to restore the technical path between search demand and an established brand. The second was to make that path more relevant by organising content around property investors rather than generic property management traffic. Then paid search could capture high-intent demand more efficiently.
The result was not simply recovered rankings. Leah Jay ended up with a stronger search acquisition system than the one the rebuild had disrupted.
More work
Legal Burke Mead Lawyers A business change required a sharper search footprint. SEO & search performance · Content & search experience 
eCommerce Hobbies Direct Paid and organic aligned to the same commercial demand. Search strategy & intelligence · Paid search & media · SEO & search performance · Data, measurement & insights