1. Client Background
Our client, a national exhibitor at Expo 2025 in Osaka, is preparing to showcase its country’s innovation, culture, and sustainability vision on a global stage. With international attention building ahead of the event, the exhibitor’s website serves as a key digital touchpoint for media, delegates, and the public, making search visibility critical to its communication strategy.
The client approached us in February 2025 with a urgent concern.
2. Client Goals
Their website had been live for several months, yet it still wasn’t appearing in Google search results – not even for highly relevant terms like “Expo 2025.” With key pages not being indexed properly, their site was virtually invisible to their intended audience.
With Expo 2025 in Osaka set to begin on 13 April 2025, the window to fix these issues was rapidly closing. With less than two months before the global event opened its doors, we knew there was no time to lose and immediately moved into action to diagnose the problem and deliver our recommendations.
3. Our Objectives
Our task was to perform a detailed technical SEO audit and deliver actionable, prioritized recommendations that could be implemented quickly.
The goal was to address foundational SEO issues that were limiting performance and lay the groundwork for sustained organic visibility in the lead-up to the Expo.
4. The Problem
Through our technical SEO audit, we identified several key issues affecting the site’s performance:
- Sitewide duplicate title tags and duplicate meta descriptions
- Numerous broken internal links affecting crawl efficiency and user experience
- Homepage content lacking clear keyword targeting and alignment with search intent
- Entire site was missing H1 tags on every page for all their page main headings
- Technical issues affecting indexing and crawling such as:
- Wrong canonical URLs for pages found in XML sitemap
- Redirect loops
- Hreflang tags pointing to non-canonical URLs
These technical and content-related issues were collectively holding back the site’s ability to perform in organic search.
5. The Challenges
With a short, one-month engagement window and the global visibility of Expo 2025 on the horizon, time was the biggest constraint.
We needed to quickly diagnose, prioritize, and deliver fixes that would deliver meaningful results fast, all while ensuring recommendations aligned with the client’s branding and international audience.
Another key challenge was the site’s content governance. Due to strict branding guidelines and a multi-level approval process, we were not able to implement or recommend significant on-page content changes.
Any edits to copy or messaging required approvals from several stakeholders, making content optimization infeasible within the project’s timeline. Therefore, our focus had to remain strictly on technical and backend improvements, as these areas are where we could act quickly and independently to deliver impact.
6. The Solution
We implemented a strategic, data-driven SEO approach:
- Technical Audit: Delivered a full analysis of the site’s technical performance, crawlability, and search readiness.
- Strategic Research: Conducted keyword research and competitor analysis to inform homepage optimization.
- On-Site Optimization:
- Recommended homepage content enhancements aligned with strategic keywords.
- Assisted the dev team to implement our technical recommendations.
- Schema Markup: Proposed and configured structured data on the homepage to enhance visibility in search results.
- We implemented an Event schema markup nested within the Organization schema, providing search engines with clearer context about the exhibitor’s role at Expo 2025 and increasing the likelihood of rich results.
7. Additional Insights: The Importance of Team Alignment
We saw good results soon after the client implemented our recommendations. However, after one week, we noticed a sudden drop in search traffic.
It turned out the client had restored an older site backup including outdated Yoast SEO settings. This unintentionally reversed many of our SEO fixes, leading to an immediate decline in visibility and traffic.
Once we identified the issue and guided them to reinstate the correct settings, traffic quickly recovered, confirming the impact of our SEO work.
This highlighted a critical takeaway: even well-executed SEO work can be undone if internal teams are not aligned. Lasting results require not just technical fixes, but also internal cooperation to preserve and build on SEO gains.
8. The Results
Within just one month of implementing our recommendations, the client’s website saw a 350% increase in organic traffic (according to Semrush data from March to April 2025).
This outcome ensured the exhibitor’s voice was heard as part of one of the world’s most prominent international events.
Conclusion
This project reinforced a core truth in SEO: strategic, technical fixes can unlock significant gains, but sustaining those results requires ongoing monitoring and internal alignment.
With limited time and scope, we proved that even short-term engagements can deliver measurable impact when guided by the right strategy and fast execution.
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