Notes

The SEO Disaster No One Saw Coming (Until Traffic Fell Off a Cliff).

News — LocalAg’s traffic didn’t stall because of content or demand — it vanished because Google literally couldn’t see the site. Here’s how we fixed it.

Posted by
15.10.2025

When a new website launches, it’s easy to assume the hardest part is done. The platform is live, the UX feels sharp, pages load quickly, and everything looks right.

For LocalAg, that was exactly the situation. Their new agricultural marketplace platform had been built by a separate development team using a modern JavaScript framework. From a user perspective, the experience was solid. From an SEO perspective, however, something critical was missing.

And at first, it wasn’t obvious.

Localag 3

A Platform Built for Users, Not Search Engines

LocalAg engaged Spicy Web to support SEO strategy during and after their website and app launch. Given the scale of their product catalogue, organic search should have been a major growth driver.

Instead, performance was flat. Search visibility was far lower than expected, with:

  • consistently low impressions

  • near-zero clicks

  • indexation that didn’t align with the size of the catalogue

This wasn’t a case of SEO “needing more time”. The signals pointed to a deeper technical constraint - Google simply wasn’t seeing large parts of the site.

That disconnect triggered a deeper technical investigation.

The Root Cause: Content Google Couldn’t See

The issue traced back to how pages were rendered. The product catalogue relied entirely on client-side rendering, meaning core content only appeared after JavaScript executed in the browser.

While this approach can work well for users, it often creates blind spots for search engines — particularly at scale. In LocalAg’s case, it meant thousands of product pages existed visually but were effectively invisible to Google’s crawler.

Once this became clear, the path forward was obvious: fix the rendering layer, not just the SEO surface.

Rebuilding Visibility With Server-Side Rendering

We worked closely with LocalAg’s development team to shift critical product templates to server-side rendering. This ensured full page content was delivered upfront, allowing Google to crawl and index products reliably without compromising performance or user experience.

Once implemented, the impact was immediate:

  • impressions began climbing as pages entered the index

  • clicks followed as rankings stabilised

  • previously invisible products started appearing in search results

It confirmed what the data had been pointing to all along — the issue wasn’t relevance or demand, it was access.

Localag 1

When the Same Problem Quietly Returned

A short time later, organic traffic dipped again.

Because technical monitoring was already in place, the cause was identified quickly. A deployment had unintentionally reverted parts of the catalogue back to client-side rendering, recreating the original problem.

The fix was reapplied within days and traffic recovered just as quickly. More importantly, additional safeguards were introduced to prevent future regressions — ensuring that hard-won visibility wouldn’t be undone by a routine release.

Within days, LocalAg saw a 97% increase in clicks and a 385% increase in impressions, driven entirely by improved crawlability and indexation.
Marina Cheveleva, SEO Specialist

The Results: Growth That Finally Reflected the Product

With rendering correctly implemented and protected, performance began to compound.

Within days, LocalAg saw a 97% increase in clicks and a 385% increase in impressions, driven entirely by improved crawlability and indexation. Thousands of previously hidden product pages became visible to Google, pushing indexed page counts up by more than 267×.

Average rankings improved as Google gained a clearer understanding of the catalogue, and organic traffic continued to trend upward rather than plateauing.

For the LocalAg team, the outcome reinforced the importance of getting technical SEO right at the foundation. As one stakeholder — with nearly 15 years of SEO experience — later put it, they’re typically sceptical of agency outsourcing, but described Spicy Web as “the real deal,” particularly on the technical side and in managing ranking factors many agencies overlook.

Why This Case Matters

This project is a reminder that modern frameworks aren’t SEO‑friendly by default. Decisions made at the rendering and architecture layer often determine whether a site is visible to search engines at all.

In LocalAg’s case, nothing was wrong with the product, content, or demand. The opportunity already existed — Google simply couldn’t access it. Once that technical barrier was removed, growth followed quickly and predictably.

It also highlights why technical SEO isn’t a one‑off exercise. Deployments, infrastructure changes, and framework updates can quietly undo progress if they’re not monitored.

When technical SEO is embedded properly — at launch, during development, and post‑launch — organic growth becomes far more durable. Instead of fighting plateaus, you give search engines a stable foundation they can reliably scale against.