The challenge
The site listed recovery meetings and resources across the United States: more than 70,000 location pages for states, cities and individual meetings. At that size, small technical problems multiply. Pages were not being crawled or indexed consistently, templates repeated the same information, and nothing told Google how states, cities and meetings related to each other.
The goal was clear: get the right pages indexed, make each one worth ranking, and be the source that search engines and AI answers cite when someone looks for help.
What I did
- Crawl and indexing clean-up with Search Console and Screaming Frog: which templates got crawled, which were ignored, and why.
- Programmatic location pages built with a team of writers and SEO specialists, so every state, city and meeting page carried useful, specific information.
- Schema and internal linking by state, city and meeting, so the hierarchy was obvious to crawlers and to people.
- GEO and AEO: short, direct answers and structured data aimed at AI Overviews.
- AI-assisted workflows with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and n8n for briefs, drafts and checks, with human review before anything went live.
Results
Daily organic clicks rose from about 700 to more than 2,300, with a peak day of 4,118 clicks. Over 16 months in Search Console (March 2025 to July 2026) the site earned 1.13 million clicks and 19.5 million impressions, with a 5.8% click-through rate and an average position of 9.6.
In Semrush (April 2025 to July 2026), visibility went from under 5% to 30.19%, ahead of the main competitor at 22.66%. Position tracking in March 2026 showed 3,020 keywords in the top 3 and 7,360 in the top 10.
The reporting platform behind it
Running several large properties needs more than a spreadsheet, so I built an SEO platform to manage them: a portfolio dashboard, weekly alerts, audits, rankings, SERP features and Core Web Vitals, a content workflow with briefs, AI drafts, a review queue and output per writer, traffic from AI assistants and AI Overview citations, and executive PDF reports.
What it means for your agency
This project was delivered as the in-house SEO lead, not as a white label engagement. What transfers to your agency is the system: the same audits, alerts, quality control and executive reports, delivered under your logo. Large-site clients such as directories, marketplaces and multi-location brands stop being a risk for your team and become retainers you can sell with confidence.
Want this for one of your clients?
Send me one client and I will scope it for free. NDA first, and you get the plan in your template.
Book a callServices used in this case
Client names and domains are confidential. Figures come from the client's own Search Console, GA4 or Semrush. Past results do not guarantee future rankings.
