How SEOmator Won Back Its Google Clicks After Cutting What It Shouldn't Have Built

The challenge

This one is our own site, so it is our story rather than a client's. It is held to the same bar as TechnologyChecker's: every figure dated, every source named, the losses published beside the wins.

Google's March 2026 core update rolled out from 27 March to 8 April. Within days seomator.com's Google clicks began to fall, and they kept falling: from 1,238 a day across March to 630 a day in April. The May core update, from 21 May, took them to 398 a day in June.

Two usual suspects were ruled out early. It wasn't links: Ahrefs counted 2,019 referring domains on 1 March and 2,673 on 1 August, so the profile grew the whole way down. And it wasn't the platform: seomator.com moved from Webflow to a new build in July, months after the fall began.

What the data did show was a site doing too many things. In the 28 days before the update, the third-largest page on seomator.com by Google clicks was a reverse email lookup, with 2,748 clicks. The same list held an llms.txt generator, a QR code reader, and blog posts on reverse video search and finding PDFs on Google. None of it has anything to do with auditing a website's SEO, which is what SEOmator does.

Emre Elbeyoglu, SEOmator's founder, read it as a problem of topical authority. A core update judges a site as a whole, and pages built for other people's searches were diluting what this one is about.

What we changed

The work ran from late June to the end of August. In order:

• Identity first (25 June – 1 July). An About page, a Trust Center with the company's legal entity and trade mark, and structured data tying the brand to both. They went live with the new build in July.
• More than 90 blog posts removed (14 and 20 July). Posts written to catch traffic rather than to serve SEOmator's readers. Posts with backlinks were redirected to their closest surviving page.
• Internal links rebuilt (27 July) around the tool pages and a smaller set of blog topics.
• Off-topic tools removed (3 to 29 August). The extractor, QR and UTM utilities first. On 20 August the email verification tool, the reverse email lookup and the website hosting checker, which now return 404 with no redirect: sending their visitors to an SEO page they never asked for would have kept the problem alive. On 29 August, the llms.txt generator.
• The audit page rebuilt (10 August). The free SEO audit tool, the page the site exists for, got an audit form in its served HTML and a first-party guide in place of a 13,000-word generic essay.
• Broken URLs cleaned up (28 and 29 August). 337 URLs that Search Console reported as not found were redirected to a successor (301) or marked gone (410).

Some of the identity work came later. The company's legal identity moved into the site-wide structured data on 6 September, after clicks had already turned, so it can't explain the turn.

The results

Clicks were flat through August. On 31 August they rose, and by the middle of September weekdays were back above 1,200 clicks a day.

Google confirmed no core update in that window. Its Search Status Dashboard lists a spam update on 18–20 August and another from 24 September, and no other ranking update since the May core update.

Most of the clicks came back

The traffic that came back isn't the traffic that left

The biggest single gain is the domain authority checker, reworked on 30 July and again on 1 October: 623 clicks in March, 10,902 now. One page now carries a third of the site's Google clicks. The audit tool is at 89% of March. Three tools kept falling and haven't recovered: the meta tags checker, the crawl test and the mobile-friendly test. The 2,748 reverse-email clicks are gone, on purpose.

The audit terms

Clicks · average position, Search Console.

The "free" audit terms are back on page one with more clicks than in March. The head term isn't: seo audit brings 765 clicks against March's 945, at an average position of 13.2 against 9.4.

How these numbers were measured

Clicks, impressions and positions come from Google Search Console for the domain property sc-domain:seomator.com, read through TinyAnalytics' Search Console connection on 21 October 2026. Days are Google's Pacific-time days.

Every comparison uses 28-day windows, so each holds four of every weekday. Weekends bring about half the clicks of a weekday here, and windows of uneven length would distort the comparison. Site totals are sums of the daily rows. Page and query rows are Google's top rows, which can leave some out, so they are never added up into a total. Positions are Search Console's average position across all countries and devices.

The chart shows average clicks per day in each month, so October (1 to 18 October, the last complete day in Search Console when this was pulled) can stand beside full months.

Google's updates and their dates come from Google's Search Status Dashboard. Links are Ahrefs' referring-domain history in subdomains mode, pulled on 21 October 2026.

The two sources disagree, and both are published. Ahrefs estimates organic traffic at 105,036 visits a month in March, 19,362 in August and 70,261 in October: 67% of March, where Search Console counts 93% of March's clicks. Ahrefs models traffic from a sample of keywords and assumed click-through rates; Search Console counts the clicks that happened.

What this can't show. We changed many things over two months while Google kept re-ranking the web. The order of events is on record. How much each change did is not.

The outcome

Two things we didn't expect. The site now shows for well under half the searches it did in March: impressions fell from 9.69 million to 4.09 million per 28 days. The pages we deleted account for part of that, but the two largest falls are on pages we kept, the audit tool (2.57 million to 996,000) and the SERP rank checker (2.56 million to 1.18 million). And when the site does show, it gets the click more than twice as often: 0.79% of impressions against 0.36%.

What's still open is on this page too. seo audit hasn't come back to March. Three tools are still falling. A third of the clicks depend on one page. And the next core update will judge the site again.