Technical SEO is the backbone of both organic rankings and AI visibility. If Googlebot or AI crawlers can’t access, understand, or properly index your content, it doesn’t matter how good that content is. It simply won’t appear in search results or AI-generated answers.
That’s exactly what was happening to Decentriq. Despite strong content and established authority, a series of hidden technical issues were quietly suppressing their performance. Their rankings were stagnating, AI citations were minimal, and search engines were struggling to crawl the site effectively.
But after a full technical SEO audit, everything changed.
⛰️ The Challenge
When Decentriq first came to us for consultation, they said their organic traffic was declining, AI visibility was low, and the number of keywords ranking in the top 10 had dropped significantly.
So, we conducted a full SEO audit to uncover what was holding the site back.
During the audit, we identified several key issues that were impacting both organic and AI visibility:
❌ Redirect chains slowing down crawling
❌ Poor URL structure that made it harder for crawlers to understand the site
❌ Weak Core Web Vitals and slow load times
❌ Missing structured data
❌ Unoptimized metadata
❌ Broken links and orphaned pages
❌ Underlinked high-value content
These issues created friction for both search engines and LLMs, causing ranking stagnation and limiting the site’s presence in AI-powered search summaries.
💡 Our Strategy
Here’s what we did to to turn performance around:
💡 Identify the highest-Value pages
Before making any changes, we needed to understand which parts of the site were worth fighting for.
So we dug into the data and built a clear picture of how the site was performing. Some pages still had strong impressions. Some were showing signs of decline. Others weren’t contributing much at all.
To make smart decisions, we used a structured framework to categorize every URL:
- Investigate: High-value pages with clear potential for quick ranking wins
- Schedule Investigation: Pages needing deeper review due to declining performance
- Keep as-is: Non-SEO or evergreen pages requiring no action
- Remove: Zero-traffic, outdated, or valueless pages with no backlinks
This process helped us cut the noise, focus on what mattered, and build a content roadmap rooted in real opportunity — not guesswork.
We prioritized pages with the highest impressions and commercial value so that every change we made moved the needle fast.
💡 Optimize metadata for quick SEO wins
The goal of this work is to enhance metadata for pages where small improvements could have a quick impact on results. These quick fixes helped drive early improvements while the rest of the audit changes were being implemented.
This involved:
- Shortening overly long metadata
- Expanding metadata that was too short
- Eliminating duplicates
- Strengthening keyword alignment
- Refreshing titles to better match search intent
💡 Fix Technical Issues
Once the content groundwork was in place, we addressed the technical barriers that were preventing search engines — and AI crawlers — from properly understanding and indexing the site.
Here’s what we fixed:
- Redirects: Removed redirect chains and cleaned up incorrect redirect mappings
- Site Speed & Core Web Vitals: Added caching, minification, and image optimization to improve load times
- Broken Links: Fixed all internal and external links causing dead ends
- XML Sitemap: Ensured only important URLs were indexed and removed clutter
- Structured Data: Enhanced existing schema and added missing structured data to eligible pages
- Internal linking: Strengthened internal links to orphaned pages and improved anchor text for context
Together, these fixes improved crawlability and made the pages far more accessible to both Googlebot and AI systems.
🚀 The Results
Within months of implementing the SEO audit recommendations, the client saw improvements across every key metric, especially in their AI visibility.
Here’s what changed:
✅ 63.6% increase in organic traffic (1,263 → 2,066)
✅ Domain Rating increased from 52 → 58
✅ Referring domains grew from 391 → 694 (77.5% increase)
✅ AI citations increased from 14 → 45 (221% increase)
✅ #1 Google keyword rankings jumped from 30 → 64
