Single-location head spa in Artesia, CA. Clean recent build, near-zero search visibility. We took it over the first week of February — Domain Rating 0.1, roughly zero organic keywords ranking, a backlink profile that needed a disavow file before it needed a content engine. Twelve weeks later: 23 weekly organic visits, 14 ranking keywords, four of them in the top-10. This is what shipped, what changed, and what didn't.
Ahrefs Domain Rating sat at 0.1. Roughly zero organic keywords ranking. About 4 weekly visits coming in from search.
~30 referring domains, the top ~20 flagged as spam on Ahrefs — buybacklinks.agency, fiverr-affordable-seo-services.site, and friends. Negative-SEO smell, disavow territory.
The blog post Google was already ranking #1 for “head spa near me” (1,244 impressions, 230 keywords over 90 days) was throwing HTTP 404 from a stale WordPress slug that never got a redirect.
Old WordPress URLs from the previous build still indexed in Google, all returning 404, leaking the little ranking equity that existed.
Title-tag duplication on five pages (double brand suffix), a banned positioning phrase showing up in seven blog + city-page locations, broken canonical tags, missing OG image.
67-URL legacy redirect map mapped to 46 active 301s, 404 recovery on the “head spa near me”-ranking blog post, lotus favicon and OG-image rebuild for SERP polish, title-tag deduplication, NAP consistency sweep across directories.
~3,000-word pillar page on the primary scalp-care service. Real operational language, no AI filler. Internal-link architecture wired every existing service page back into the cornerstone.
Each post targets a specific search intent we identified as winnable through competitor gap analysis on the top-5 ranking results. Hub-and-spoke linking: every post points back to the cornerstone, the cornerstone points to bookings.
Method: before writing a page, we crawled the top-5 ranking competitors and engineered each piece to fill what was missing in the search results. No generic content; no AI slop.
Flat through February and most of March. The acceleration starts the week of Apr 6 — when the Sprint 2 blog posts cleared Google's typical 4-to-8-week indexing-and-ranking lag.
| Keyword | Position | Monthly volume | Visits / wk |
|---|---|---|---|
| what's a scalp treatment | #8 | 150 | 6 |
| hot towel on face benefits | #5 | 40 | 4 |
| scalp treatment meaning | #10 | 100 | 3 |
| what is the purpose of a general scalp treatment | #5 | 30 | 3 |
Two pages do most of the work — the cornerstone hub and one of the three Sprint 2 blog posts. 21 of the 23 weekly visits trace back to those two URLs. The original "head spa near me" #1 ranking (1,244 impressions / 90 days) is back live on the recovered blog post.
Content sprints don't move backlinks. The toxic-domain disavow file shipped, but real link-equity work is a separate workstream sequenced for later.
Local Pack ranks on Google Business Profile signals — review velocity, photos, posts — not blog content. The GBP playbook runs in parallel and on a different timeline.
AI engines weight authority and editorial citations, both of which lag the kind of fast-compounding gains you get from hub-and-spoke content alone.
We tell clients what works andwhat won't until later. No oversell.
Real data. Real findings. A prioritized roadmap before you spend a dollar. No pitch deck, no commitment.