Most traffic landed on pages nobody could buy from
Strong organic volume, weak pipeline, and a content library built on a publishing calendar rather than on intent.
- Enquiries
- 1.0x2.4x+140%
- Indexed pages
- 368118-68%
- Enquiry cost
- 1.0x0.76x-24%
Rolling 12 months against the preceding 12. Source: PostHog and CRM, July 2025
Context
A professional training provider with 368 indexed pages, six years of blog output, and a sales team reporting that inbound enquiries had stopped converting.
The constraint
The thing that ruled out the obvious answer.
The existing library represented years of internal effort and had strong emotional ownership. Deleting pages required convincing the people who wrote them, not just a technical decision.
Diagnosis
The blog was outranking the course pages for the queries that mattered, and cannibalising them. Most organic sessions landed on informational pages with no path to an enquiry, while the pages built to convert had no organic entry at all because thin variants were competing with them.
What we rejected, and what we chose instead
Any firm can describe what it built. The useful record is the option that was on the table and did not survive.
Rejected
Increase paid spend to compensate
It would have bought volume at a rising cost while leaving the structural problem intact. The organic base was strong, it was pointed at the wrong pages.
Chosen
Merge and delete, then rebuild around intent
Consolidating 368 pages into 118 removed the cannibalisation. Every surviving page maps to a specific question with a specific next step.
What was actually implemented
- 01Intent map built from Search Console queries and recorded sales calls, not keyword volume
- 02Page map: merge, rewrite, redirect or delete, decided per URL with the content owners in the room
- 03301 map reviewed twice before a single page moved
- 04Internal linking rebuilt so every informational page routes to a commercial one
- 05Lifecycle sequences triggered by page cluster rather than by newsletter schedule
Measured, not estimated
Qualified enquiries rose 140% over twelve months on 68% fewer indexed pages. Blended cost per enquiry fell 24% with no increase in paid budget.
Rolling 12 months against the preceding 12. Source: PostHog and CRM, July 2025
Removing content created more demand than publishing more content.
More from growth
Growth
Search, content architecture and lifecycle systems. Built around what people are actually trying to do, not around a keyword volume export.