Forensic SEO Consulting - 100% Success Rate

Forensic SEO, as the name might suggest, involves a variety of reverse-engineered SEO practices that seek to recover the visibility a site once had. It’s not about growth, but returning to your true ranking potential.

Recover your seo

While this is very common after an algorithmic penalty or manual action (external influence), it can also occur during a site migration or redesign (internal influence). In these cases, there are lower relevance scores or the introduction of harmful signals that result in the loss of keywords, visibility, and search traffic for keywords or pages involved.

Reasons for SEO Losses

There are hundreds of factors that go into play when evaluating where a website should rank in search results. This is why you need an experienced forensic SEO to help pinpoint the source of the problem and recovery plan.

Search engine algorithms evolve constantly, reshuffling rankings and prioritizing different signals. If your site’s SEO strategy is outdated, rankings can plummet overnight. Forensic SEO identifies which changes impacted your visibility and implements data-driven solutions to regain lost ground, whether it’s content updates, technical fixes, or strategic link-building.

This is one of the most difficult situations to fix.

Google issues manual actions for violations like unnatural backlinks, thin content, or spammy tactics, causing severe ranking drops or complete deindexation from search results in the worst cases. The forensic SEO investigates the penalty, removes harmful elements, and submits a thorough reconsideration request (think of it like an apology letter) to Google. The goal is to restore your site’s credibility, ensuring compliance with Google’s quality guidelines for long-term recovery. You’re using their product afterall.

This is the only situation where Google tells you exactly what is wrong with your website. But it is your job to clean up.

Google penalizes AI-generated, low-quality, or manipulative content. This is most obvious shortly after Google confirms spam updates have been rolled out, which happens a few times each year. If your site relies on spammy backlinks or completely AI-generated copy without proper oversight, you will lose rankings. Through forensic SEO, we audit and remove harmful elements, ensuring your content and backlink profile align with Google’s evolving quality standards.

The reality is that you will lose ground for not doing enough. Your competitors know this and will use it to their advantage.

Industries investing heavily in SEO can push competitors down the rankings simply for having a stronger brand, stronger content, and/or stronger backlinks. If your competitors consistently optimize and you don’t, your visibility declines. Forensic SEO uncovers where you’re losing ground, analyzes competitor strategies, and creates a plan to enhance your authority through better content, technical improvements, and stronger backlink acquisition.

Targeting the wrong search intent—like using a blog post for a transactional query—confuses search engines and users alike. This results in lower rankings and poor conversions. Forensic SEO corrects intent mismatches by using a data-first approach to restructuring your pages, refining keyword targeting, and ensuring pages serve the right user needs.

A simple mistake—like a robots.txt error, noindex tag, or a CMS glitch—can remove your site from Google’s index. If your traffic drops overnight, forensic SEO helps investigate and resolve indexing issues, ensuring all crucial pages are properly crawled and ranked. Rapid recovery is key to preventing long-term damage.

If an ex-employee or vendor sabotages your SEO—deleting pages, injecting spam links, or modifying site settings—your rankings can collapse. Forensic SEO detects identify what happened so you can remove the harmful element, and help you implement security measures to prevent future attacks, restoring your site’s integrity and search visibility.

Google’s search results are evolving. We’ve seen this in the last year with AI Overviews and Google Merchant Center used for e-commerce SEO for the first time, and other features reducing organic visibility. If your traffic drops due to these shifts, forensic SEO adapts your strategy—leveraging structured data, brand authority, and content optimization to secure visibility despite these changes.

Although rare, Google introduces new ranking factors that shift SEO priorities. If your site isn’t optimized for these changes, rankings can suffer. Forensic SEO tracks emerging ranking signals, evaluates their impact, and fine-tunes your site to stay competitive—ensuring long-term, sustainable visibility.

As an international forensic SEO consultant who has worked in hundreds of SEO recoveries with a 100% success rate, I have included below the best forensic SEO tactics for websites losing SEO ground.

How To Identify The Source of Loss

A comprehensive analysis of your website, historical performance, and cross-referencing with external factors (like algorithm changes) is needed to narrow down or isolate the source of the decline.

This is the framework I use to identify what happened and how to fix it.

What happened? Was it a site-wide drop? a single page? or a specific keyword losing ground? Are there any patterns in their performance, maybe visibility spikes a few months or a year prior? Were competitors affected, or just you?
When did it happen? Was it overnight? 6 months in the making? or a gradual 2-year decline? Analytics and keyword ranking tools can help here. If you can pinpoint a specific day, that is very valuable info, like a website update or algo change.
Did you roll out a website change around that time? Check in with developers, engineers, or website managers.
Did Google release an algorithm update? Check official documentation and SERP monitoring tools.
Did you receive a manual action? Check Google Search Console.
Have you done an expert SEO audit before?

Keep in mind that there isn’t a single element that moves the needle in a website’s SEO growth. In the same way, there may not be a single fix, and in some cases, there may not be a way to recover if the source of the loss is due to an algorithm change where SEO factors are weighed differently.

Regardless of the reason, an expert forensic SEO consultant will help you identify what is holding you back from SEO success.

Forensic SEO Tactics

The specific forensic SEO tactics vary depending on the unique historical situation of a website. You must first complete an SEO Audit that reviews technical errors, content health, and on-page SEO elements so you can rule out the fundamentals before proceeding into more complex situations:

Comprehensive SEO Audit
Content Audit
Backlink Toxicity Analysis
E-E-A-T Analysis
Manual Action Recovery
Algorithmic Penalty Recovery
Reputation Management

Whether a single analysis or in conjunction with other audits, together we can create expert strategies for recovery & subsequent growth.

The Path to SEO Recovery

Don’t let poor search engine visibility or self-destructive marketing initiatives hold your business back. Contact me today to learn how Forensic SEO consulting services can help you improve your website’s performance and achieve your true ranking potential.