How to turn a temporary traffic spike into sustainable SEO growth

The context

Guideflow is a B2B SaaS platform that enables teams to create interactive guides and automated demos. Following a website redesign in late November 2025, the team noticed something alarming: a massive traffic spike followed by a sharp decline.

Their first reaction: they thought they had broken something during the redesign.

Our diagnosis

After analyzing their Google Search Console data, we identified the real cause: there was no technical issue.

The impression spike around November 24th was caused by temporary overperformance on Ahrefs-related queries. Three pages had briefly captured a disproportionate volume of impressions through a featured snippet on a high-volume keyword.

Our conclusion: The "drop" wasn't actually a drop. It was simply a return to normal baseline after a one-time, non-reproducible event.

This analysis helped reassure the Guideflow team and refocus efforts on what truly mattered: building healthy, sustainable organic growth.

Our approach: the expert consultant role

Rather than taking over full execution, we adopted a strategic advisor role. The Guideflow team had the technical skills to implement changes — they needed an expert perspective to identify the right levers.

Our mission focused on two key areas.

Area 1: Tutorial pages optimization

Guideflow uses programmatic SEO to generate hundreds of tutorial pages. Our goal: optimize them to appear as featured snippets against their competitors.

Key recommendations:

• Redesign the "other tutorials" block to display 3 cards from the same tool
• Create dynamic pages per tool listing all related tutorials
• Restructure content using ordered lists to improve Google extraction
• Optimize meta descriptions with action-oriented format
• Replace generic H2s with dynamic, differentiated fields
• Implement HowTo structured data

Area 2: Technical performance optimization

The website had several technical issues impacting user experience and crawlability.

Issues identified and resolved:

• Inconsistent URL canonicalization
• Missing alt text on images
• Duplicate Google Analytics code
• Fonts loaded from Google Fonts (migrated to local WOFF2)
• Unused CSS and JavaScript
• Incomplete structured data
• Thin content pages in sitemap

What we implemented directly

While our primary role was advisory, we handled certain critical technical optimizations:

• Structured data: Fixed and added schema on homepage and tutorial pages
• Video migration: Moved videos from Webflow to Bunny.net
• Code cleanup: Removed orphan CSS classes and unused scripts
• Accessibility: Added titles to iframes and aria-labels to icon links
• HTML semantics: Implemented article tags for blog and tutorial pages

The results

Technical performance - Mobile Homepage

• Before
  
  • Performance : 43
  • Accessibility : 89
  • Best Practices : 77
  • SEO : 92
• After
  
  • Performance : 63
  • Accessibility : 96
  • Best Practices : 77
  • SEO : 92

Organic visibility

We started in early December. Results observed in late January show healthy, consistent growth:

• FAQ rich results: 0 → 5 valid items
• Review snippets: 0 → 27 valid items
• Indexed pages: Grew to 1,367 pages in the index
• Overall trend: Impressions and clicks steadily rising, now exceeding the November spike level — but this time sustainably

Key takeaways

• A traffic spike isn't always good news — and its "drop" isn't always a problem
• Programmatic SEO requires careful attention to structured data and content differentiation
• Technical optimization remains an underrated SEO lever
• A good consultant identifies what NOT to do as much as what to do