Foreign Affairs Auto — a South Florida European auto specialist founded in 1982 — had strong brand recognition but was losing organic share to newer competitors with cleaner technical foundations.
Four decades of incremental site changes had left behind a tangle of duplicate service pages, inconsistent canonicals, and internal linking that rewarded nothing in particular. The brand equity was real; the crawl graph didn't reflect it.
Over six months we ran a full technical audit, consolidated duplicate service pages, rebuilt internal linking around brand + service intent, and executed a white-hat digital PR programme built specifically to land on URLs that could actually rank.
The site now attracts 6.1K organic visitors per month across 7K ranking keywords, backed by 911 referring domains — a defensible authority moat in a competitive niche that would take a well-funded competitor years, and six figures, to replicate.
This case study walks through the discovery findings, the technical remediation sequence, the information architecture rebuild, the content and PR programme, and the measurement framework that let us prove causality rather than correlation.
Every number on this page is sourced.
Metrics below are captured directly from Semrush during the engagement window (Dec 2025 — Jun 2026).
What a 40-year crawl history actually looks like
We opened the engagement with a full-site crawl (Screaming Frog + GSC coverage export + Semrush Site Audit, cross-referenced for false positives) rather than trusting any single tool's summary score. The crawl surfaced 147 discrete technical issues, which we triaged into a fix log with owner, priority, and estimated ranking impact.
The headline finding: six near-identical brand verticals — BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Porsche, MINI, and Land Rover repair — each had duplicated service pages (brake repair, transmission, diagnostics) with 80%+ text overlap. Google was folding most of these into a handful of indexed URLs and ignoring the rest, which meant half the site's content investment was earning zero ranking credit.
Beneath that: inconsistent hreflang for the practice's meaningful Spanish-speaking client base, a redirect chain three hops deep from an old CMS migration, and mobile LCP over 4.0 seconds on the pages that mattered most commercially.
- Duplicate service pages diluting ranking signals
- Slow LCP (>4.0s on mobile) hurting Core Web Vitals
- Weak internal linking between brand pages and services
- PR mentions landing on redirected or canonicalised URLs
- Inconsistent hreflang for the Spanish-speaking audience segment
A hub-and-spoke model built for how people actually search
Once the crawl was clean, we rebuilt the internal-linking model around a hub-and-spoke: brand hubs (BMW repair, Mercedes repair) linking down to service spokes (transmission, brake, diagnostics), and every spoke linking back up to the relevant location page — closing the loop that generic navigation had been missing.
This mattered because the site's actual search demand splits cleanly into two intents: brand-qualified ('BMW transmission repair Miami') and service-qualified ('transmission repair near me'). The old flat architecture served neither well; the hub-and-spoke model let each page compete for the query cluster it was actually built to answer.
Writing for the gap, not for the word count
Content briefs were built from a Semrush + GSC gap analysis rather than a generic content calendar — we looked at what the site was already ranking position 8–20 for and wrote to close that gap specifically, since that's the fastest-moving traffic band in an established site.
Every new or rewritten service page included a diagnostic-specific FAQ block, sourced from actual service-desk questions the shop fields daily, which doubled as both user-value content and FAQPage schema targets.
Only launching PR once there was something worth linking to
Only once the crawl was clean did the digital PR programme launch — targeting automotive trade publications, local Miami business press, and enthusiast community forums where European car owners already congregate and trust recommendations.
Twelve high-authority placements were secured over the engagement window, each pointed at a canonical, indexable service or brand hub — not a homepage blast, which is the single most common mistake in agency-run PR campaigns. Anchor text was varied naturally across brand, service, and branded-navigational terms.
The result compounded because referring-domain growth landed on pages already structured to convert that authority into rankings, rather than pages that would need a second remediation pass six months later.
- 12 high-authority PR placements across trade + local press
- Anchor text distributed across brand, service, and navigational terms
- Every placement pointed to a canonical, indexable target URL
Location signals in a multi-city service area
Because Foreign Affairs Auto serves a wider South Florida catchment than a single storefront address suggests, we built out location-specific service pages with unique local proof points (turnaround time, loaner-car availability, local landmark directions) rather than templated city-swaps.
AutoRepair, LocalBusiness, and FAQPage schema were deployed across the full page set so that rich results and, increasingly, AI-search citations had structured data to draw from rather than having to infer entity relationships from prose.
Every number in this report is sourced and dated
We instrumented the engagement against three sources — Semrush for keyword and authority tracking, Google Search Console for click and impression ground truth, and GA4 for on-site behaviour — reconciled monthly so no single tool's blind spots could distort the read.
A weekly technical monitor (crawl diff + Core Web Vitals field data) ran throughout the engagement so regressions were caught inside a sprint, not discovered three months later in a quarterly report.
OPTIMIZE applied end-to-end
This engagement is a textbook SEO Growth Process execution: Observe (audit), Plan (fix log + IA), Test (staged rollouts), Iterate (weekly CWV monitoring), Measure (Semrush + GSC + GA4), Improve (content refresh cycle), Zoom (topical expansion), Elevate (authority campaign).
- Observe: 147 technical issues found and triaged
- Plan: 6-month roadmap with weekly sprints
- Iterate: monthly ranking + CWV reviews
- Elevate: 12 high-authority PR placements
Honest retrospective
In hindsight, the hreflang consolidation should have been a week-one fix rather than a month-two one — it was deprioritised behind duplicate-content cleanup because its estimated ranking impact looked smaller in isolation, but it was blocking a meaningful slice of Spanish-language local search demand the whole time.
We'd also start the digital PR outreach relationship-building (without live pitching) a few weeks earlier in parallel with the technical fix window, since trade press relationships take longer to warm than the technical work takes to complete.
Six months, month by month
Month 1: full technical audit, fix log, and no outward campaign activity — foundation only.
Month 2: duplicate-page consolidation, hreflang fix, LCP remediation, and IA rebuild begins.
Month 3: hub-and-spoke internal linking ships across all brand and service verticals; content gap analysis completed.
Months 4–5: content programme in production; digital PR outreach begins and lands first placements; schema deployed sitewide.
Month 6: PR placements complete at 12; full measurement reconciliation; roadmap handed off for the next growth phase.
If your business looks like this one
If you're running an established local or regional service business with real brand equity but flat or declining organic traffic, the diagnosis is often the same: technical debt is capping what your content and authority can achieve, and no amount of new content will fix a duplicate-content or crawl problem underneath it.
The sequencing matters more than the individual tactics — audit and fix first, rebuild architecture second, then layer content and authority on a foundation that can actually convert them into rankings. Skipping the order is the most common reason SEO investments underperform.
Deliverables & stack
Deliverables
- Technical SEO audit & fix log
- Internal linking map
- 50+ location + service pages
- Digital PR campaign (12 placements)
- GBP optimisation & review workflow
Tools & stack
"They took a 40-year-old website and made it feel like a modern product. The traffic followed."
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