Case Study · Ecommerce, outdoor and home water features
Water Feature Pros: +34% Non-Branded Clicks After Fixing a Broken Migration
+34% Non-branded organic clicks in 30 days
Water Feature Pros, a veteran-owned nationwide WooCommerce retailer of outdoor fountains and water features, came to me in February 2026 after a site replatform left roughly 5,000 404 errors, thousands of crawl issues, and a host that was serving CAPTCHAs to Googlebot. I rebuilt the technical foundation, moved the site to a host that let search engines in, and launched a data-driven content program. Within the first three months, non-branded organic clicks rose 34 percent in a 30-day window versus the prior 30 days, driven by content that represented only about 10 percent of the scoped work.
Results SnapshotThe Situation
The Challenge
Water Feature Pros sells outdoor fountains, pool waterfalls, lake fountains, and indoor water features across the United States, with a strong B2B customer base of landscapers, architects, builders, and parks departments. The catalog was real: nearly 1,000 published products. The search presence was not keeping up.
A replatform before my engagement had gone badly, and roughly five months of prior SEO work had left no clear record of what was fixed. My initial audit found around 5,000 404 errors, more than 460 URLs returning 410 Gone responses, and thousands of crawl issues against only about 600 indexed pages. Every URL on the site rated Poor for Core Web Vitals on both mobile and desktop, with field data showing a 6.7 second Largest Contentful Paint and a 5.1 second time to first byte.
Worse, the hosting environment was actively working against the site. The host served CAPTCHA challenges to Googlebot, returned 403 errors to SEO crawlers on every URL, and threw intermittent 500 errors during crawls. Product pages sent authority out to manufacturer sites instead of strengthening the site's own categories, and the blog had never driven meaningful traffic.
The Work
What Was Done
Redirect triage first
I hand-mapped 455 broken source URLs to their best live targets, product by product, so years of accumulated link equity and crawl demand stopped dead-ending into error pages.
Moved the site to a host that lets Google in
The CAPTCHA and 403 problems could not be configured away, so I managed a full hosting migration to WP Engine. When recurring 504 outages appeared afterward, I traced them through server logs to a caching plugin feature firing cron jobs every minute, consuming over 12,000 seconds of server time in a single week, and disabled it.
Audited the plugin and asset bloat
The homepage was loading 75 external JavaScript files, 34 external CSS files, and 115 font-face declarations across 8 font families. I documented all 40 active plugins and charted a reduction plan to roughly 22, including cleanup of orphaned scheduled tasks left behind by abandoned plugins.
Built the keyword strategy from competitive data
I ran a 2,051-keyword gap analysis against 13 competitor domains, which surfaced 420 page-two quick wins and more than 1,100 keywords where competitors outranked the site. That analysis became the backbone for a 51-article content plan, a brand tone of voice guide, and a location page strategy covering more than 35 cities the site referenced but had never built pages for.
Launched the content program
I wrote and published the first waves of blog articles in March and April 2026, each targeted at gap-analysis keywords and illustrated with real product imagery. Two of the first eight articles reached the site's top-performing pages by clicks within about two months.
Rearchitected the category taxonomy
I merged the developer's category review with the keyword gap data into a hybrid cleanup plan: a 146-row merged catalog, 9 new gap-fill categories including a new category hub backed by 97 gap keywords, reassignment of 53 uncategorized products, metadata and descriptions for roughly 89 categories, and 301 redirect maps for every moved URL.
Scoped the platform's future
With WordPress structural issues limiting how much of the plan could safely deploy, I built the strategy and migration plan for a move to Shopify, including a full data export of the catalog and a staged rebuild ahead of an August 2026 launch target.
The Payoff
Results
All changes below are from Google Search Console for waterfeaturepros.com, non-branded queries only, comparing the most recent 30 days to the prior 30 days as of the May 2026 program snapshot. Exact traffic figures and keywords are confidential to the client. Performance data available on request.
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Non-branded organic clicks | Baseline | +34% |
| Non-branded impressions | Baseline | +14% |
| Non-branded CTR | Baseline | +17% relative improvement |
Those gains came from the content program alone, which at the time represented only about 10 percent of the scoped work. The taxonomy overhaul, location pages, and the remaining 50 planned articles were still queued behind the platform decision, meaning the growth curve was built on a fraction of the plan. Session analytics also recorded early AI referral traffic arriving from ChatGPT during the same period.
Tools used: Google Search Console, SEMrush, PageSpeed Insights and CrUX field data, Microsoft Clarity, WP Engine server log analysis, desktop crawl audits, Yoast Premium, and WooCommerce.
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