Founder, Canadian B2B services firm (~25 employees)

An Ottawa B2B services firm needed a brand-driven website rebuild after eight years on a hand-coded site. They'd watched a peer company lose 50% of organic traffic on a similar redesign two years earlier. We ran the rebuild as a joint design + SEO program with explicit ranking-preservation guardrails.

Service & engagement

The challenge

The existing site had 180+ indexable pages, ranked on page 1 for an estimated 240+ commercial queries, and produced roughly 60% of the firm's qualified leads. The brand and visual design were genuinely outdated — but the SEO performance was the firm's most valuable digital asset and could not be put at risk. The previous design vendor had quoted the rebuild without any SEO continuity plan; the founder paused the project and engaged us instead.

Approach

1. 1
   Audited the existing site's SEO equity in weeks 1–2: cataloged all ranking URLs, top-100 commercial queries, schema implementation, internal-linking patterns, and the top 30 backlink targets.
2. 2
   Designed the new site with explicit SEO continuity requirements as part of the brief: URL structure preserved 1:1, H1 + H2 hierarchy preserved, primary content blocks preserved (with copy refresh allowed but not deletion), schema parity required at launch.
3. 3
   Built the new site on the same technology stack (no replatform), allowing the team to test SEO continuity at staging without the confound of a CMS migration.
4. 4
   Ran 4 SEO QA cycles at staging in weeks 8, 10, 12, and 14: title tags, meta descriptions, canonical, robots.txt, sitemap, schema, redirect map, internal linking, page speed.
5. 5
   Launched on a Tuesday morning. Ran a 30-day post-launch sprint: daily GSC monitoring for the first 14 days, weekly thereafter. Caught and fixed 4 minor regressions within 24 hours of detection.

Outcomes

Reflection

The 'redesign that destroys rankings' failure mode is preventable but not accidental. It requires treating SEO continuity as a launch-blocking requirement in the design brief — not as a post-launch fix. The most under-spent investment in any rebuild is the SEO QA pass at staging; we run four. The most overrated risk is platform change; the actual risk is uncoordinated content + URL rewrites. Bundle the design and SEO programs from kickoff and the cliff disappears.