Enterprise SEO Turnaround: Reversing Decline Across 27,000+ Pages

This engagement reversed a multi-year organic traffic decline for an enterprise broadcast network, growing organic sessions ~50% year over year across a 27,000+ page Drupal ecosystem. Here is the full story: the situation, the strategy, the measurable results, and what I would do differently now.

The Challenge

An enterprise broadcast network inherited a massive ecosystem: 27,000+ Drupal pages, multi-year traffic decline, crawl budget hemorrhaging, and deep technical debt. Duplicate content, orphaned pages, and infrastructure chaos—with no map of the architecture.

The Strategy

Started with diagnosis, not action. Conducted a comprehensive technical audit identifying 6,400+ duplicate and orphaned URLs. Mapped the entire site structure, built a prioritization framework, then systematically consolidated through redirects and crawl optimization. Built GA4 event tracking for donation flows so leadership could see organic search’s contribution to revenue.

The Results

Recovered 35% of crawl budget and grew organic sessions ~50% year over year. Resolved 6,400+ duplicate and orphaned URLs and brought 96,000+ pages under automated SEO governance in Drupal. FAQ schema strategy lifted SERP feature visibility 23%. LCP improved 38%; CLS failures dropped from 41% to under 8%. Established governance playbooks the organization still uses.

What This Taught Me

Enterprise-scale SEO requires both technical depth and change management. The biggest wins come from finding what’s broken in the infrastructure. And when you connect SEO to business outcomes—like donation revenue—leadership starts paying attention.

What I’d Do Differently

I would have built the GA4 donation-revenue attribution in month one. Once leadership could see organic search’s contribution to revenue, development prioritization accelerated. Establishing that connection earlier would likely have moved the redirect and architecture work forward by several months.

I’d also pair remediation with governance from day one. Consolidating 6,400+ duplicate URLs and resolving thousands of orphaned pages addressed the existing debt, but without publishing standards and clear ownership, that debt starts accumulating again immediately. The governance playbooks came later; they should have shipped with the audit.