Case study · Blackacre Surveyors
A site full of content that Google had quietly stopped taking seriously
A London chartered surveying practice with well over a hundred pages of genuinely expert material — and almost no search traffic to show for it. Six months of steady work took it from around six clicks a day to over twenty.
The situation
This is a common shape of problem, and it rarely looks like a problem from the inside. The practice had been publishing for years. The writing was good — technical, accurate, the kind of thing only someone who does the work could produce. The site looked fine. Nothing was obviously broken.
But it was earning roughly six visits a day from Google, and the average page sat at position 22 — the middle of page three, where nobody goes. The site was appearing in front of searchers constantly and almost never being clicked, because appearing on page three is functionally the same as not appearing at all.
Nobody had done anything wrong. The site had simply drifted: published without a plan, never revisited, never tidied, never optimised. Years of small neglect compound quietly until the whole thing underperforms.
What we did
No relaunch, no rebuild, no dramatic gesture. Monthly work, from February to July, on five fronts:
- Stopped the site competing with itself. About 29 articles were live at two addresses each, splitting their rankings in half. Several services had two or three versions of the same page, with three separate right-to-light pages alone. Each now has one address, with the old ones redirected to it, and the blog moved to a clean address structure under a single redirect rule.
- Cleaned up the library. A Search Console review of every page sorted the articles into keep, improve, merge and remove. Thin and overlapping posts were merged or taken down; the ones worth keeping were restructured and re-optimised.
- Published new articles against real demand. Twenty-five new pages, each aimed at a question clients were typing into Google, including a run of guides on the Renters' Rights Act as it came in.
- Rebuilt the first service pages. Measured surveys, area measurement, secured lending, and the about and contact pages were rewritten to answer the buyer's questions and lead to an enquiry, instead of reading like a brochure.
- Fixed the technical foundations, and put names to the work. A full crawl in July found broken redirects on two valuable old addresses, one with over 300,000 historic impressions, plus redirect chains; all were fixed. Author pages went up for the two chartered surveyors who lead the work, so the guides are credited to qualified people.
The results
Monthly clicks from Google search
Traffic starts climbing within a month of the work beginning, and doesn’t stop.
View as table
| Month | Clicks | Avg. position |
|---|
Traffic roughly tripled, but the more telling detail is when. Clicks had sat between 122 and 205 a month for the whole preceding period, with no trend in either direction. The engagement began in February, which immediately edged above the top of that range — and from March onwards it isn’t close. Every month of the engagement has beaten every month before it.
Average ranking position
The site moved off page three and onto page two. Axis is inverted, so up is better.
This is worth being precise about, because average position is the metric most often quoted misleadingly. A site that ranks for 200 terms and one that ranks for 20,000 are not comparable on an average. Over this period the practice's search footprint expanded substantially, so the average position number understates the improvement rather than flattering it.
Where the new traffic comes from
Clicks earned by articles published during the engagement.
A quarter of the site's search traffic didn't exist six months ago.
The top performer — a guide to a specific statutory rent-increase form — was published in May and reached page one within weeks. It now earns more search traffic than most of the site's long-established pages.
Crucially, almost none of this is brand traffic. Searches for the practice by name account for about 9% of clicks. The other 91% are people with a problem and no idea who the practice is — which is the only kind of traffic that grows a business.
What's happened since
The figures above stop at July. Since then the work has moved onto the biggest opportunity: the right-to-light and daylight pages, which were shown to searchers over 220,000 times a month but converted 0.02% of it, about 43 clicks, because they sat between positions 16 and 30.
- The main service pages are rebuilt. Right to light, daylight and sunlight, viability, commercial due diligence, listed buildings, party walls, Level 3 surveys, topographical surveys, laser scanning, 3D modelling and building height have all been rewritten since August.
- The competing right-of-light articles are merged into one guide, so they stop splitting the same searches.
- Over 40 guides published or rebuilt between August and October, in clusters that each support a service page: commercial due diligence, listed buildings, measured surveys, viability, rights of light and the Renters' Rights Act.
- The listed-building page now targets clicks, not just rankings. It already ranked in the top five for its biggest commercial searches but almost nobody clicked, so its title, description and layout were rebuilt around that.
None of that is counted in the results above. Its effect will show from the autumn, and this page will be updated when it does.
All figures taken directly from Google Search Console, comparing the 12 months to August 2026. The engagement began in February 2026. The work listed under ‘What's happened since’ is not reflected in these figures.