The Post-Acquisition SEO Problem
You've just acquired a company. The deal team is moving on to the next one. Operations is figuring out systems integration. Finance is reconciling the books. And somewhere in there, the website that generates 30% of revenue is running on autopilot.
This is when organic traffic starts to slip. Nobody's watching the Search Console. Technical issues pile up. Content goes stale. Competitors sense blood in the water.
I've seen portfolio companies lose 40% of their organic traffic in the first year post-acquisition. Not because anything went wrong. Just because nobody was paying attention.
The 90-Day Framework
Days 1-7: Baseline & Access
- Get access to Search Console, Analytics, CMS
- Establish current traffic baseline and ranking positions
- Identify any immediate fires (manual actions, major drops)
- Document what the previous team was doing
Days 8-30: Quick Wins
- Fix critical technical issues blocking indexation
- Recover any lost rankings from recent drops
- Update title tags on top-performing pages
- Fix broken internal links and redirect chains
- Address any obvious content gaps
Days 31-60: Foundation
- Full technical audit and remediation plan
- Content inventory (what to keep, update, or kill)
- Backlink profile cleanup if needed
- Establish ongoing monitoring and reporting
Days 61-90: Growth
- Execute on highest-impact content opportunities
- Implement site architecture improvements
- Begin systematic keyword expansion
- Set up scalable processes for ongoing optimization
What I Typically Find
After working with PE portfolio companies, here are the patterns I see:
- Neglected technical debt from years of "we'll fix it later"
- Content decay where articles from 2019 are still ranking but losing ground
- Orphaned pages with no internal links pointing to them
- Cannibalization where multiple pages compete for the same keywords
- Missed opportunities in keywords the company should own but doesn't
- Broken analytics making it impossible to measure actual performance
The Compound Effect
SEO improvements compound. A 10% increase in organic traffic in month one becomes 15% in month three, 25% in month six. The earlier you start, the more you capture over the hold period.
I've seen companies where a focused 90-day SEO push added more incremental revenue than six months of paid advertising. And that traffic keeps coming after you turn off the spend.
Start Your 90-Day Push
Begin with a $499 audit. I'll identify the quick wins and build the roadmap for the full 90 days.
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