Most SEO case studies end at the nice bit.
Traffic is up. Rankings are up. Everyone’s happy. Someone puts +488% in a very large font.
This one has a second chapter.
And it’s probably the more interesting one.
Nine months of steady growth
We started working on this website around August 2025, beginning with a website revamp.
At the time, it was generating 23,548 monthly Google search impressions and appearing for 743 search queries.
Then things started moving.
By January 2026, the site was appearing for 2,012 queries.
By March, 3,160.
And by May:
138,471 monthly impressions.
4,113 ranking queries.
In around nine months, impressions had increased by 488% and ranking queries by 454%.
Source: Google Search Console Report Created in Data Studio
Average position had also improved from 53.45 to 24.49.
A very nice-looking graph.
Until June.
Then the website went offline
We gave Silk Plant a modern SEO makeover built for the way people actually shop online in 2026:
A hosting issue made the website inaccessible.
Which presents a small problem when your job involves improving a website.
Namely, the lack of website.
And the change in Google visibility was hard to miss.
| Metric | May | June | July |
|---|---|---|---|
| Impressions | 138,471 | 38,883 | 17,677 |
| Ranking queries | 4,113 | 2,628 | 1,994 |
| Avg. position | 24.49 | 34.46 | 40.04 |
And it wasn’t just impressions taking a hit. The website was disappearing from more searches, while its average ranking position was heading in the wrong direction too.
Source: Google Search Console Report Created in Data Studio
There was no mysterious Google penalty or dramatic SEO experiment behind the change.
The site simply wasn’t accessible.
Then August got interesting
The website came back online.
And the graph finally showed signs of recovery.
Impressions increased from 17,677 to 28,769.
Ranking queries increased from 1,994 to 2,210.
But here’s the bit that caught our attention.
August 2025: 23,548 impressions.
August 2026: 28,769 impressions.
Almost exactly one year apart.
In between those two numbers, the website had climbed all the way to 138,471 monthly impressions.
Then, after being inaccessible, it found itself remarkably close to where the journey had started.
Not completely back at square one. The site still had considerably more ranking queries than it did a year earlier.
But it wasn’t a case of switching the website back on and carrying on from where we’d left off either.
Apparently Google doesn’t have a “don’t worry, we’ll save your spot” feature.
Would be handy.
The bit that's easy to overlook
We’re used to thinking about SEO as a growth exercise.
How do we rank for more searches?
How do we increase visibility?
How do we get from 23K impressions to 138K?
This experience raised a slightly different question:
How much attention do we give to protecting the visibility we’ve already earned?
Because the unglamorous parts of running a website rarely get much attention when everything is working.
Hosting isn’t exciting.
Domains aren’t exciting.
Backups aren’t exciting.
Keeping the website accessible definitely isn’t going to win Marketing Idea of the Year.
But months of SEO work ultimately sit on top of those boring little things.
And when one of them disappears, things can get interesting rather quickly.
In this case, the website came back.
The visibility started coming back too.
Just not from where we’d left it.
Sometimes growth isn’t the thing you need to think about most.
Sometimes it’s making sure you don’t have to grow the same thing twice.