Case Study: SaaS Accounting Site Grows to About 800 Visitors per Day

Quick Summary (If You Are in a Hurry)

A German SaaS company that sold accounting software had a broken 15,000-page multilingual website. After a staged cleanup, its organic traffic grew from about 20 to 30 to about 800 organic visits a day.
The site had thousands of empty and broken pages across five languages, plus broken links, missing meta descriptions, and thin content.
The real cause was a mass automatic translation run with no backup, on a site no one was monitoring for health.
As the hands-on lead, I deleted the broken translations, cleaned the German core, rebuilt the other languages cleanly, and trained the team to run SEO themselves.

The lesson: a big website needs regular health checks, because small problems grow quietly into expensive ones.

Full Case Study

At a Glance

Client: a German SaaS company that sold accounting and bookkeeping software to businesses across the EU
Platform: WordPress with WPML, in five languages (German, English, French, Spanish, and Dutch), about 15,000 pages
Service: technical SEO audit, multilingual cleanup, and growth
Timeline: 2016, about five months, in three phases
Headline results: organic traffic grew from about 20 to 30 to about 800 organic visits a day, and SEMrush technical errors fell to zero in about three weeks

Client and Context

The client was a German company that sold accounting and bookkeeping software to businesses across the European Union. Their marketing website was central to how they won customers, so its health mattered directly.

The site ran on WordPress with WPML, the plugin that runs a multilingual site. It served five languages, with German as the base, and had grown to about 15,000 pages.

The work came through Upwork. The client first asked me to check a small 30-page test site. Happy with that report, the CEO opened up the full site and told me it was time for the real job.

The Problem

The CEO’s request was clear. He wanted to know whether the site was technically sound, fast, and ready to rank in five languages, and how to grow organic traffic.

The trouble had started just one day before I was hired. The marketing team had run a mass automatic translation of thousands of pages with WPML and Google Translate, without backing up the WordPress database first. Some of those pages came out completely empty.

The client knew exactly what had caused it. They did not need me to find a culprit. They needed a way out.

The damage was easy to see once you looked:

Many of the auto-translated pages were completely empty.
Links were broken in many places.
A lot of pages had no meta description, the short summary Google shows in a search result.
Much of the content was thin, with very little real text.
Many images were large and slow to load.

Each problem hurt the business in a direct way:

A finance-software buyer who landed on an empty page would not trust the company with their books.
With about 15,000 pages, no one could find all the broken ones by hand.
No one had a full view of the site’s health, so problems had piled up unseen.

The Audit and Diagnosis

The true cause was not a mystery. A mass automatic translation, run with no backup and no checks, had created thousands of broken pages on top of a site that no one had been watching for health.

What no one knew was how deep the damage went. So I measured it. I ran a full crawl with Screaming Frog, a tool that visits every page and lists its technical problems, and cross-checked the results in SEMrush, an SEO health-tracking tool.

The crawl made the scale plain:

Thousands of empty and thin pages, spread across all five languages. The automatic translation had failed silently on many of them.
Broken links and missing meta descriptions throughout the site.
Heavy, unoptimized images that slowed the pages down.

The deeper insight was that the site was not only broken but bloated with low-value pages. Before it could grow, it had to get smaller and cleaner.

The Solution

The plan was a staged repair, with German treated as the single source of truth. German was the base language, so if a German page was empty or pointless, its translations were worthless and could go.

I worked through it in a deliberate order:

Deleted the automatically translated pages in the four non-German languages, to be rebuilt cleanly later.
Audited and cleaned the German core. I removed pages that served no purpose, expanded the ones that mattered, fixed internal links, and set 301 redirects, which are permanent forwards from an old address to a new one.
Did on-page SEO across the German core, covering titles, meta descriptions, headings, and internal links.
Required a full backup before any language was rebuilt. The whole mess had started with a missing backup, so this was not optional.
Once the German core was stable, rebuilt the other four languages cleanly and added a blog, so the company could rank for more terms in every language.

I did the major, higher-risk technical work myself. A freelance developer, hired through Upwork as my assistant, handled the easier fixes under my direction and left when the technical work was done. A separate in-house developer who had built the site’s custom theme worked with me to fix its bugs. Because I do not read German, I wrote all my content in English, and an employee on the team reviewed even that before it went live.

While the cleanup ran, I also made the site faster. I optimized the images, replaced three single-purpose plugins with one that did all three jobs, and fixed bugs in the custom theme, found with PageSpeed Insights, Screaming Frog, and SEMrush.

The CEO asked for a written record of everything, so every problem and its fix went into a dated before-and-after log. That log did double duty.

The log was the report the CEO wanted, and it also became the team’s own manual for the same problems if they returned. We stayed in daily contact on Slack, with the weekly report on top of that.

The last and longest phase was training. I taught the marketing team to do their own keyword research, study competitors, use the SEO tools, and format blog posts so they read well on a phone. To show them how, I wrote several example SEO blog posts in English. My written guides were created in English, then translated into German as standing rules for the team.

The Results

Organic traffic grew from about 20 to 30 to about 800 organic visits a day, and the technical errors SEMrush had flagged fell to zero in about three weeks.

The numbers moved in clear stages:

SEMrush technical errors: a long list, down to zero in about three weeks.
Site speed: faster pages, after image optimization, plugin consolidation, and theme bug fixes.
Organic traffic within a few months: from about 20 to 30 up to about 200 to 250 visits a day.
Organic traffic two to three years later: about 800 visits a day, seen in the analytics still linked to my account.

One moment stayed with me. A marketing employee said she had learned more in two days with me than in her previous two years at the company.

The real test of training is what happens after you leave. I had taught the team to run their own SEO, and I left them a system for it. They kept it running. Year after year, their organic traffic has continued to grow, long after my work was done.

The business outcome was steady and lasting. A finance-software company that had been quietly losing trust through broken pages ended with a clean, fast, multilingual site, and a team that could keep it healthy.

Tools and Methods Used

Diagnostics: Screaming Frog, SEMrush, Google Analytics, and PageSpeed Insights, Google’s page-speed checker.
Performance: image optimization, consolidating three single-purpose plugins into one, and custom-theme bug fixes.
Multilingual and content: WPML, 301 redirects, on-page SEO, Google Translate for the clean rebuild, and a new five-language blog.
Research: competitor and keyword research, with various SEO browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox.
Safety and process: a full backup before any language was rebuilt, and a dated before-and-after log of every fix.

Are You Facing a Similar Problem Right Now?

Maybe your site has grown large, and you suspect problems are hiding inside it. Many owners avoid looking, because they fear what they will find. Most of it can be fixed with a clear plan and steady, careful work.

If you want calm, simple help to understand your own website, you can contact me.