I've been doing SEO since 2008. This domain has been live since 2012. For a long time it did exactly what I needed it to: show up well enough that a prospect could find me if they went looking. I wasn't chasing inbound leads. Referrals kept me busy.
The last time I really touched it was 2017. That was cosmetic work on a site that needed something more. I knew it then. I moved on anyway.
It's an embarrassment now. I want my own house back in order.
Here's where the site stood on April 20, 2026.
I pulled everything when I started this project. The numbers were not good.
Google Search Console (April 20 snapshot):
205 · Homepage impressions
0 · Clicks
41.3 · Average homepage position
Not zero traffic because nobody searched for NJ SEO services. Zero clicks because nothing ranked where it needed to.
SEMrush organic positions (April 20 snapshot):
pos 28 · "new jersey seo company" — 1,600 monthly searches
pos 30 · "nj seo company"
pos 25 · "seo morristown nj"
pos 11 · "nj seo"
Page three. A site that used to place in the top five for these terms.
GA4 (60-day window, ending April 20):
150 · Sessions
149 · Users
2.5 · Average sessions per day
A 14-year-old domain generating two and a half visitors a day.
Google removed the Business Profile entirely. Local pack presence: gone.
The rebuild is underway.
I'm not patching the old site. I'm replacing it.
New platform. The site is being rebuilt on Next.js. Faster rendering, cleaner technical structure, better Core Web Vitals baseline than the existing WordPress install.
Seven pages rebuilt from scratch. Home, Local SEO, Attorney SEO, Answer Engine Optimization, the AEO Tracker, What Are Bad Links, and About. Each with a clear keyword target, proper schema markup, and content written for how people search in 2026, including AI overviews.
Redirect plan. The 60+ old posts are being consolidated via 301 redirects into the relevant core pages. Crawl budget reclaimed. Whatever link equity exists follows the redirects.
GBP recovery. The Business Profile is being rebuilt from current state: photos, services, posts, citation consistency across directories. The local pack in NJ is worth fighting for.
The terms and the timeline.
These are the keywords I'm tracking from the April 20 baseline:
nj seo company · 1,300 monthly searches · KD 27 · pos 81
new jersey seo company · 1,600 vol · KD 25 · pos 28
local seo nj · 720 vol · KD 10 · pos 58
nj seo · 1,900 vol · KD 29 · pos 11
For the primary cluster, I'm expecting 4 to 6 months to see meaningful movement. That's competitive NJ search from page three.
Between April 20 and April 25, positions were already ticking up before the new site was live. The audit work, the redirect planning, and the GBP cleanup are registering. Google notices when a neglected property starts getting attention again. The signal it cares about is consistency, not a single publish date.
This is the first post in a potential series. Follow-up posts will come if the numbers justify them. If positions move, I'll document what moved them.
The work is happening in public.
If your site looks like mine did on April 20, book a free intro call. I'll tell you what I see and whether the engagement makes sense. No pitch, no pressure.
WRITTEN BY
SEO & Answer Engine Optimization Specialist
I'm an independent SEO and answer engine optimization specialist based in Morris County. I help small businesses rank in Google, and now in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI overviews. No agency overhead. No junior account managers. Just focused, expert work.