
Inside TechTarget's Massive SEO Cleanup: The Case Study You've Never Heard (with Jenny Waggenheim) | Ep. 29
From Performance SEO Unpacked by ResultFirst
October 29, 2025 · 38 min · Season 1 · Episode 29
About this episode
The episode discusses a significant SEO cleanup case study at TechTarget, highlighting strategies that led to a remarkable recovery in organic traffic.
Performance SEO Unpacked with Ruchi Pardal [https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruchipardal/] brings a real-world case study: a previously successful search program collapses overnight—a 25% drop with 90% of traffic from organic. No splashy trend report—the playbook is patience and the messy work most SEOs avoid. Guest Jenny Waggenheim [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennywaggenheim/] walks through late 2019 when a massive site with 50-something subdomains and thousands of index pages hit a wall. Signals pointed to old content, page speed, and a registration process—fixed to second click so Google always saw content the way users did. The team cut about 80% of the content (hundreds of thousands of pages), cleaned up index pages, and consolidated subdomains to sub-folders—site by site over 18 months. Hidden wins included topical authority, better crawl bandwidth, pillars that brought in millions of organic page views and thousands of new members, and finally 200% growth year over year, the highest traffic ever. The takeaway: slow down, do a full audit, seek outside help, and build a better site. ㅤ 👤 Guest Bio Jenny Waggenheim [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennywaggenheim/] is a seasonal SEO…
People in this episode
Host: Ruchi Pardal
Guest: Jenny Waggenheim
Topics covered
- SEO
- case study
- content strategy
- site audit
- organic traffic
Keywords
- SEO cleanup
- organic traffic
- content audit
- site strategy
- B2B tech
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: TechTarget
More episodes of Performance SEO Unpacked
- Exploring the journey from clicks to conversion · May 21, 2026 · 37 min
- How to create content that connects, converts, and scales - Nuno Bamberg · April 30, 2026 · 23 min
- When Visibility Backfires: Managing Brand Sentiment in the AI Search Era · February 11, 2026 · 24 min
- From Layoffs to Leads: Building a Thriving SEO Consulting Practice Today | Ep. 32 · December 10, 2025 · 34 min
- From Vanity to Value: Rethinking Digital Performance Metrics in a GenAI World with Scott Lux | Ep. 31 · December 3, 2025 · 30 min
- When AI Eats the Middle: Rethinking Local SEO as the Buyer Journey Goes Conversational | Ep. 30 · November 19, 2025 · 26 min
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Performance SEO Unpacked podcast page.