The Tour Guy

// the problem

A redesign had moved the site to headless WordPress with a React front end that built every page in the browser. Crawlers received a near-empty HTML shell, so hundreds of content-rich tour and destination pages were effectively blank to Google. The damage was invisible because the site worked for every human who checked it. Organic growth had stalled at roughly 4,400 visits a month.

// the approach

• Diagnosed the empty rendered shell by comparing view-source against the rendered DOM and confirming what Googlebot saw in GSC URL Inspection.
• Quantified the blast radius with a JavaScript-rendering crawl in Screaming Frog, rather than guessing from a handful of pages.
• Built a remediation plan and added a prerendering layer so crawlers received fully rendered HTML instead of the blank scaffold.
• Rebuilt content depth and internal linking on top of pages that could finally be crawled, indexed, and ranked.

// the result

Once crawlers could read the pages, ranking-ready content surfaced fast. Organic traffic climbed from roughly 4,400 to about 175,000 visits a month by May 2023, close to a 39x increase, and organic traffic value rose from around $1,000 to roughly $72,000 a month, a 72x increase. The early phase of that recovery is the 950% figure cited elsewhere on this site; the full-tenure number is larger.