A small business client came to me in April 2025 after their organic traffic dropped from roughly 3,200 visits monthly to around 1,300. They'd hired someone cheap on a marketplace who "optimized" their site. The damage was real.
What I Found
The previous person had stuffed keywords everywhere. Title tags read like spam: "Best Plumber Miami Plumbing Services Miami FL Plumber." Meta descriptions were identical across 40% of pages. Header hierarchy was broken with H1 tags appearing three times per page. Internal links used the same anchor text repeatedly.
Page load speed had dropped to 6.8 seconds on mobile because someone added five tracking scripts without compression.
The Changes
I rewrote every title tag to include the primary keyword once, naturally, with the brand name. Each meta description got rewritten to actually describe that specific page's content. I restructured headers so each page had one H1, then H2s and H3s in logical order.
For internal linking, I varied anchor text and only linked where it made sense for users. Removed three unnecessary tracking scripts and set up proper image compression, dropping mobile load time to 2.1 seconds.
Three Months Later
Traffic recovered to 3,100 monthly visits by July 2025. More importantly, their contact form submissions went from 8 per month to 23. The client's cost per lead dropped significantly.
The work took about 18 hours total. Nothing fancy, just fixing the fundamentals that someone had wrecked trying to game the system. Sometimes the best optimization is just undoing bad optimization.