From a failed website migration to strong recovery, local search dominance and record AI search visibility
Sportball is a leading provider of children's sports programs across Canada and the USA, operating in hundreds of cities.
Project overview
Here's how I helped Sportball, a leading children's sports program provider across North America, recover from a website migration that did not consider strategic SEO in the design, which resulted in up to 90% traffic loss, then surpassed their previous performance through strategic SEO, technical optimisation, new content and scalable location page architecture.
Sportball consolidated their Canadian (.ca) and US (.us) websites into a single .com domain, in an effort to standardize content and centralize control across a growing franchise network. The goal of the new website was to improve the user experience, but these actions eliminated the foundation of their local search presence.
By implementing a comprehensive recovery strategy we not only recovered lost traffic but achieved tremendous YoY growth and positioned Sportball for the future of AI-powered search.
Results
- Traffic recovery and growth: Recovered and surpassed pre-migration traffic and ranking performance.
- Location page success: Location pages generating +59% YoY clicks and +66% YoY sessions, proving local pages can drive real value at scale.
- Non-brand expansion: Non-brand traffic is now almost at 50% share, reducing dependency on brand searches and expanding market reach.
- AI search leadership: Highest visibility among competitors in AI-powered search results, with having the most citation in AI responses on ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini for thousands of prompts.
- Keyword dominance: Key location-based brand and non-brand search terms recovered from devastating losses to exceed previous performance.
Within a few short weeks, Nik had diagnosed our issues, created a plan, and began implementing fixes in collaboration with our development and marketing teams. While the results took time to realize, within less than 12 months we had achieved higher web traffic, keyword rankings, and positions than before the migration and are now well positioned to capture the changes that AI will bring to conventional search.
What I truly appreciate about Nik’s approach to SEO is that he has his finger on the pulse and is constantly thinking about what’s coming down the pipe to help build long term strategies that drive ROI. I can’t thank or recommend Nik enough!
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