How Choose Wheels Recovered from a Google Penalty and Grew Traffic by 124%

Background

Choose Wheels is a review site focusing on personal transportation—think electric scooters, e-bikes and hoverboards. It operates on an affiliate model, earning commissions when readers click through to buy from retailers like Amazon. Organic search drives roughly 70% of its traffic. When a manual Google penalty wiped out 80% of visits, the owners called in Pat Ahern from Inter-Growth to rebuild and grow the site.

Challenges

During an audit, Pat’s team identified three core issues: a weak backlink profile compared to rivals, outdated content on high-value pages, and poor on-page engagement metrics such as high bounce rate and low session duration. A private blog network link penalty was already in place, so they faced both cleanup and growth efforts.

Strategy

The plan split into short- and long-term moves. In the first months, the team focused on low-hanging fruit: publishing monthly blog posts targeting long-tail search terms, updating flagship articles with the best ROI potential, and fixing technical issues to speed up page load. Simultaneously they mapped a six-month content calendar informed by competitor analysis and community forums like Reddit and Quora.

Over the long haul they set up targeted outreach to niche publishers for high-quality backlinks and committed to quarterly premium guides aimed at high-volume, competitive keywords.

Implementation

First, Pat’s team optimized the 15 top-converting pages with fresh title tags, meta descriptions incorporating TF-IDF terms, and improved page speed. Next, they published long-form posts on specific scooter and bike topics, promoting them in relevant Facebook groups and subreddits. These pieces quickly outranked established sites for mid-tier keywords.

For links, they reached out to 1,000 bloggers and secured at least ten backlinks each quarter and dozens of social shares. Underperforming pages were tracked via a CTR calculator, then headlines and descriptions were reworked to lift clicks. Pages with high bounces had content refreshed—added comparison charts, updated specs, and clearer calls to action.

Results

In the first two months traffic continued to slump while the foundation was laid. But by month three, organic visits jumped 20.2% as new and optimized content went live and the first link campaign kicked in. Over the next four months:

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• Keyword visibility rose 459%.
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• Monthly organic traffic climbed 121%.
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• Overall site traffic ended up 124% above its post-penalty low.
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On-page metrics improved as well—bounce rate dropped 15% and average session duration went up 40%. All goal conversions jumped 526%, proving the traffic boost wasn’t just volume but quality as well.

Conclusion

By taking a methodical approach—auditing technical health, refreshing existing content, creating targeted new articles, and building quality backlinks—Choose Wheels not only recovered from a severe Google penalty but ended up with stronger SEO performance than before. Brands facing similar setbacks can follow a comparable playbook to rebuild authority and drive sustainable growth.