A recruitment firm changed its name and nearly gave away fifteen years of search visibility in the process. This is what the work looked like, and what I would do differently if I were starting it again.
Route Networking Group had been placing people in Boise and across Idaho for years. The name no longer fitted what the business had become, so it became RNG Group.
A rebrand is a marketing decision. It is also, whether anyone intends it or not, a technical one. Every page that ranked, every link pointing at the old name, and every piece of content written under the old brand is now attached to a business that no longer calls itself that.
The risk is not that the new name performs badly. The risk is that the site quietly stops being understood, and nobody notices for six months because the enquiries tail off slowly rather than stopping.
I ran a full read-only audit before changing anything. Three findings mattered more than the rest.
Most of the blog was unreachable. 102 posts had no internal links pointing at them. They existed in the sitemap and nowhere else. From Google’s point of view, and from a reader’s, they may as well not have been published.
The site was competing with itself. Nineteen posts were targeting keywords another post on the same site was already targeting. That is not a ranking problem, it is an arithmetic one: two pages splitting the signal for one query beat neither the competition nor each other.
The structured data contained ratings nobody had given. The site was publishing review markup with star ratings that did not come from real reviews. That is a manual-action risk, and more importantly it is not true.
The work ran over several weeks, one class of problem at a time, verifying the live site after each. Batching unrelated fixes is how you end up unable to say which change caused which result.
| What was measured | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Posts with no internal links pointing at them | 102 | 3 |
| Images with missing alt text | 129 | 8 |
| Posts targeting a keyword another post already owned | 19 | 0 |
| Automated accessibility violations | Present | 0 |
| Content score, first optimised article | 39 | 75 |
| Content score, second optimised article | 39 | 76 |
The internal linking was rebuilt as a generated map rendered through a filter, rather than by editing 160 articles by hand. That matters for a reason that has nothing to do with SEO: the client edits their own site. Hand-edited links get overwritten the first time someone opens the page builder. A generated block survives, and switching it off is one deletion.
The cannibalisation fix is the one most people get wrong. Changing the focus keyword field in an SEO plugin changes nothing, because Google never sees that field. Re-targeting a page means rewriting its heading and thinning the competing phrase out of the copy. In each of the nineteen pairs, the stronger page kept the head term and the other moved onto a query its content already answered.
Crawl budget went to the pages that earn it. 165 tag archives, 46 testimonial pages and the job-detail template were set to noindex while still passing link value. Redirects were rebuilt so every one resolves in a single hop rather than a chain.
Partway through, two articles refused to improve past the low seventies no matter what went into them. The reason turned out to be worth more than the fix.
Both were written for employers. Both targeted phrases where every result on page one was a job board serving candidates. The page was answering a question nobody searching that phrase was asking.
No amount of optimisation wins a search whose intent belongs to someone else. It is the same judgement that decides which terms a service business should chase at all. I stopped, said so, and we left those two where they were. That is a better outcome than spending another day pushing a number that would not have brought a single client.
The headline number here is not the content scores. It is that a business changed its name without losing the visibility it had spent years earning, and now has a site where the pages it wants found are the pages that can be found.
Most founder-led businesses are not short of marketing activity. They are short of a decision about what matters. The Founder-Led Marketing Scorecard takes about three minutes and tells you which of seven areas is holding the rest back.
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