ID Cosmetic Clinic
A physician-led medical aesthetic clinic offering non-surgical treatments — Botox, dermal fillers, picosecond laser, and skin tightening. An earlier redesign left old URLs unhandled with no 301 redirects, and moved the language structure into subdirectories without correcting hreflang, costing the site substantial traffic. We took the project over in May 2026.
What we inherited
This was a rescue. The redesign had already shipped before we were involved, and the problem was not the design — it was the move. Old URLs were left unmapped, and when the language structure changed from mixed Chinese/English into subdirectories, the markup that tells Google about it was never updated. The redesign was the right decision; the layer skipped during execution is what cost the traffic.
What the diagnosis found
- Large numbers of old URLs returned 404 instead of pointing at their replacements — years of accumulated link and ranking signal aimed at addresses that no longer existed
- No 301 redirects were in place, so none of that equity could pass to the new pages
- Internal links still pointed at pre-redesign paths, so the site kept rediscovering its own 404s
- hreflang was never corrected for the new language subdirectories, leaving the Chinese and English versions competing for the same queries
- Several pages targeted overlapping keywords, competing with each other rather than with the market
How we worked
- 01
Map first, redirect second
Every pre-redesign URL was matched to its closest replacement before a single 301 was deployed. The order matters: redirecting everything to the homepage without a map pours all the signal into one place and loses the relevance each old page had earned.
- 02
Fix internal links at the source
Redirects alone leave every click paying an extra hop, and the site keeps handing crawlers its own 404s. Internal links were repointed at the new paths so the redirects only have to catch inbound external links.
- 03
Correct the language signals
hreflang was rebuilt for the subdirectory structure with reciprocal pairs throughout. Misconfigured hreflang is worse than none — it actively tells search engines a relationship that isn't true.
- 04
Separate the overlapping pages
Pages competing for the same terms were reassigned by actual search intent, so each cluster has one clear target. This step adds no content at all, yet it is often the real reason rankings have stalled.
Where it stands
The technical faults are cleared: old URLs redirect to their replacements, internal links point at real paths, and hreflang resolves reciprocally. We publish no traffic figures for this case — we do not hold Search Console access to the property, so nothing we quoted could be verified by us. What is checkable is the repair itself: you can test the old URLs on that site and see where they now resolve.
What we did
- Cleared the mass of 404s left by the redesign
- Built a URL map and deployed 301 redirects
- Repaired broken internal links
- Resolved keyword overlap between pages (cannibalisation)
- Corrected hreflang on the new language subdirectories
- Competitor content and content-gap analysis
