Wildlife control marketing, nationally
A Rebuild Cost This Client 66% of Its Search Traffic. We Are Publishing It Anyway.
A website rebuild and a change of direction cost 66% of one client's search traffic. Here is the full number, what grew, and what we would measure first.
A Pest Control Company With a Wildlife Division
The subject of this page is a Tennessee pest control company with a wildlife division. Not a pure wildlife company. Pest is the larger half of the business, and the wildlife work runs beside it.
We are keeping the name off the page. Not because the client asked, but because the number at the bottom is ours to publish and theirs to live with. Every figure stays exactly as we measured it.
Two things happened at this company inside the window we are about to measure, and you need both before you see any traffic number.
They moved to a new website. A rebuild changes the address of every page, and the old addresses are the ones search engines have been sending people to for years.
Then the owner changed direction. Wildlife had been earning a large share of the site's traffic. The company decided to lead with general pest work instead, and the wildlife and rodent content stopped being the priority.
Both were deliberate. We did the technical work, built the wildlife side of the content, and measured what the year actually did.
What We Found
We reviewed the site before any work started.
| What the audit found | Pages |
|---|---|
| Running the homepage meta description word for word | 187 |
| Meta descriptions too long to show in a search result | 310 |
| Titles that were under-optimized | 221 |
What We Fixed
The technical pass ran May 19 to May 20, 2026.
| Fix | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Internal 4xx errors | 3 | 0 |
| Internal redirects | 123 | 40 |
| Pages with two H1 headings | 6 | 1 |
Then the verified after-state. The crawl on May 20, 2026 covered 291 pages and returned zero duplicate title groups and zero duplicate meta description groups.
One thing did not reach zero. A single meta description still runs past 160 characters, on the contact page, at 174. We are naming it, because a report that rounds 1 down to 0 is the kind of report you have already paid for once.
A second crawl on July 18, 2026 covered 318 pages and found zero broken internal links.
What Grew
We built a wildlife removal hub, one page per animal. Every page in it started at or near zero. Clicks, 90 days before the fix against 90 days after:
| New wildlife page | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Groundhog | 10 | 69 |
| Dead animal removal (exclusion section) | 0 | 33 |
| Bat | 1 | 29 |
| Skunk | 0 | 26 |
| Snake | 3 | 25 |
| Raccoon | 3 | 21 |
| Hub overview | 2 | 12 |
That is about 215 clicks a quarter. Small. We are not going to dress it up as anything else. It is also the only part of the site that went up, and it went up from nothing in a single quarter.
One more subtraction belongs here. These pages replaced older animal pages at shorter addresses, and those pages went to zero: groundhog 13 to 0, skunk 11 to 0, raccoon 7 to 0, snake 4 to 0. So 35 of the 215 is traffic we moved rather than traffic we made.
What It Cost
The same two windows, the whole site. Feb. 19 to May 18, 2026 against May 21 to Aug. 20, 2026.
Clicks fell from 13,398 to 4,531. Down 66%. Wildlife paths fell from 3,669 to 543, down 85%. Impressions fell from 1,186,220 to 226,742, and average position went from 4.1 to 10.4. All three moved together, so this is not a story about click-through rate. Year over year rules out a slow season: July 2025 was 3,820 clicks and July 2026 was 1,186.
Three causes, in order of size.
The rebuild changed the URL structure. Content moved out of the old topic folders and into a single blog folder. The old addresses decayed and the new ones never recovered the volume. Their single best performing article, a common household pest question with nothing to do with wildlife, drew 3,451 clicks at its old address in the before window and 243 in the after window. Its replacement at the new address went from 440 to 608. That one topic accounts for 3,040 of the 8,867 clicks the site lost.
The pivot is the second cause. The wildlife and rodent content that had been earning the most stopped being the content the company wanted to lead with, and traffic follows attention.
The third is a year of change stacked on top of both.
The May work was technical hygiene. It did not cause this and it was never going to prevent it. We are also not going to tell you the decline is fixed, or give you a month when it comes back. We do not know, and a date would be a guess with a number attached.
Why We Are Telling You This
A rebuild costs search traffic. Every time. Nobody moves a site's URL structure and keeps every ranking, and any agency that has been through more than two rebuilds knows it. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling.
So the question was never whether it would cost something. The question is whether the agency measured the cost, said the number out loud, and said it before the client found it alone.
That is the whole argument for this page. You are going to hire somebody who reports on their own work. Some quarter, your numbers will move the wrong way, and the report that lands on your desk will either say so or find a chart that hides it. We would rather you decide which kind we are by reading our worst one than by listening to us describe ourselves.
If you are weighing a rebuild and nobody has told you what it costs in search traffic, reach out. We will tell you what we would measure before you start, so the number is not a surprise nine months later.
Reach out