A diagnostic audit, recovery plan and prioritised execution spreadsheet for a luxury lighting retailer whose organic traffic had been falling for months. Implemented in-house, it took keywords in the top 3 from 802 to 1,505 and organic clicks back to around 18.8K per 30 days.
Lighting Collective
Luxury Lighting Retail
4 Weeks
Australia
Lighting Collective is an Australian luxury lighting retailer. Its organic traffic had been stable at around 20,000 clicks a month until July 2025, then declined steadily. By December clicks had fallen to 8,850 and impressions had dropped by about 60%.
An issue with the store’s inventory system integration in October 2025 made things worse: 114 product pages started returning 404 errors and 217 internal links pointed at pages that no longer existed. The team needed to understand what had happened and have a clear plan to recover.
Analysed Search Console, Semrush and six competitors to find when and why the decline began. It started in August 2025, before the October integration issue, and was not explained by competition.
Crawled the site for 404s, broken internal links, redirects and orphaned pages, finding 121 missing pages (114 of them products) and 217 broken internal links.
Reviewed the 84 highest-impact pages. 77% still existed but had lost rankings, which made existing pages, not missing ones, the main recovery focus.
Found 29 pages with backlinks that now returned 404, about 20 of them valid product pages, and flagged them as the first fixes.
A project management spreadsheet that ranks every fix by impact, backed by a recoverability assessment of what would be fast, medium or slower to improve.
The client team implemented the plan themselves: fix what is broken first, then strengthen key collection pages.
Organic clicks had fallen to 8,850 in December 2025. Between 5 April and 20 August 2026 the site earned 86.4K clicks, an average of around 18.8K per 30 days and close to the roughly 20K a month it earned before the decline. Compared with the previous period, clicks grew 36.5% and impressions 22.2%, while average position improved from 11.3 to 10.1.
Google Search Console: 5 April to 20 August 2026 compared with 3 January to 17 May 2026.
Keyword rankings had been falling every month. Keywords in the top 3 dropped from 1,507 in January 2025 to a low of 802 in February 2026. After the plan was put in place they climbed to 1,505, back to the level of January 2025.
Semrush organic keywords by position, when the plan was put in place compared with now.
Google’s Generative AI impressions reached 199K between 18 May and 20 August, with daily impressions rising from around 1.5K to more than 3K.
The number of keywords appearing in Google AI Overviews also grew about 5x, from 60 to 299.
Google Search Console: Generative AI impressions over time.
This is a recovery in progress. The plan put fixing what was broken first and then rebuilt rankings: keywords in the top 3 are back to the level of January 2025 and clicks are close to the level before the decline.
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