Case Study · Microsoft partner consultancy (Dynamics 365, Business Central, ERP, Power BI)
Stoneridge Software: Reversing a Traffic Decline While Merging Three Acquired Domains
+44% monthly organic clicks from spring 2020 to February 2021
Stoneridge Software, a Microsoft partner consultancy specializing in Dynamics 365, Business Central, and Power BI, was losing organic traffic year over year while absorbing three acquired-company websites into its main domain. As the SEO strategist on the agency team from 2020 through 2022, I delivered an 85-page technical audit, mapped roughly 775 redirects across three domain consolidations, and built the competitor and content roadmaps behind the turnaround: monthly organic clicks grew 44 percent between the engagement's first tracked month (spring 2020) and February 2021, impressions grew 74 percent over the same windows, and the site finished 2020 first in organic visibility against its tracked competitor set.
Results SnapshotThe Situation
The Challenge
Stoneridge Software had deep expertise and a large content library, but its search performance was moving the wrong way. Organic clicks were sliding year over year, a decline that deepened to 21 percent by October 2020, with a head term for one of the company's flagship product comparisons falling from position 1.4 to 3.8.
Underneath the traffic problem sat real technical debt: more than 400 overlong page titles plus widespread duplicates, roughly 1,500 oversized images, 26,000 AMP validation errors, a tangle of 301, 302, and 307 redirects, and weak 404 handling. The company had also acquired multiple businesses whose websites, adv-usa.com, levridge.com, and prophet.ca, needed to be consolidated into stoneridgesoftware.com without losing the equity they had built.
When Stoneridge returned in 2024, the problem had changed shape: traffic was healthy but conversion measurement was blind. Contact form submissions were not being captured in tracking data, the form itself was dated and heavy with fields, and duplicate event tags were breaking funnel reporting.
The Work
What Was Done
An audit that became the roadmap
In April 2020 I delivered an 85-page technical site audit with every finding ranked by effort and impact, backed by ten crawl-data exports covering redirect chains, canonicals, broken inlinks, missing alt text, and page speed opportunities. That prioritized list drove the technical work for the rest of the engagement.
Three acquisitions, one domain
I planned and quality-checked the consolidation of three acquired-company websites. For adv-usa.com that meant roughly 555 one-to-one content redirect mappings plus about 220 legacy URL redirects, with launch checklists covering Search Console and Bing verification, change-of-address submissions, and redirect testing. I handled the levridge.com redirect and the prophet.ca migration for US and Canadian audiences, where post-launch crawl QA caught redirect chains resolving to 404 pages.
Competitor intelligence at scale
I built a keyword gap analysis spanning roughly 60 competitor domains, including microsoft.com, oracle.com, and netsuite.com, consolidated into a 52,000-row keyword summary, and translated it into client-facing recommendations that fed the content roadmap.
Content and architecture
I produced content outlines with title, H1, and keyword specifications for about 20 Microsoft product pages, a full example page mockup for a core product implementation page, FAQ structured data markup, navigation recommendation workbooks for the Dynamics product and industry menus, and internal linking priorities supported by a newly configured related-posts system.
Measurement discipline
The engagement ran on a monthly reporting cadence: organic traffic and keyword reports, an annual 2020 growth report, Search Console coverage drilldowns, recurring 404 and redirect cleanups, and an indexation analysis across 208 Wistia video pages. When a February 2022 site relaunch cut organic clicks sharply, I produced the eight-week before and after comparison that isolated exactly which of the site's 2,268 pages had lost visibility, turning a vague traffic drop into a page-level diagnosis.
The 2024 return engagement
Two years later, Stoneridge hired me directly for conversion analytics. I set up custom Microsoft Clarity tracking, analyzed session recordings and GA4 funnel paths into the Contact Us page, and delivered two insight decks plus a dashboard walkthrough. The analysis showed the Contact Us page generated 88 percent of all form submissions from June through December 2024 even though those submissions were invisible in tracking data, and it produced concrete form modernization, CTA, and event-tracking recommendations across the homepage, Copilot, and Dynamics product pages.
The Payoff
Results
All growth is shown relative to the engagement's first tracked month, with time windows as labeled, from Google Search Console and SEMrush reporting for stoneridgesoftware.com. Exact traffic figures and keywords are confidential to the client. Performance data available on request. Phase 1 was a team engagement, and these numbers describe the site's growth during that period.
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly organic clicks | Baseline month (Apr 4 to May 3, 2020) | +44% (Feb 1 to 28, 2021) |
| Monthly organic impressions | Baseline month (same windows) | +74% (same windows) |
| Competitor visibility (SEMrush) | #1 in tracked competitor set: 0.56% vs ifs.com at 0.40% (Apr 29 to Dec 30, 2020) | |
| Keywords in Google top 100 | 9.8K (through Dec 31, 2020) | |
| Backlink profile | 97.5K backlinks, 2.7K referring domains, Authority Score 51 (through Dec 31, 2020) |
The trajectory matters as much as the endpoints: clicks were down 21 percent year over year in October 2020, then finished February 2021 up 44 percent against the engagement's first tracked month, with impressions up 74 percent. One honest caveat: average CTR eased from 4.37 percent to 3.62 percent across those windows as impressions grew faster than clicks. The 2024 engagement concluded with delivered recommendations, and performance data for that phase is available on request.
Tools used: Google Search Console, Screaming Frog SEO Spider, SEMrush, Ahrefs, GA4, Microsoft Clarity, Bing Webmaster Tools, and Wistia video analytics, on WordPress hosted at WP Engine.
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