ChessWize: +791% organic search traffic

Before the rebuild, Google showed impressions for just nine ChessWize URLs, and 96% of search visits in the quarter before cutover landed on the homepage. Nearly all of it came from people already searching for the brand.

Leads came from Meta and Google ads, so every inquiry carried a media cost. ChessWize needed a search channel it owned, and faster follow-up on the leads it was already paying for.

Our own first build was a single-page React app. Our SEO plan flagged its hash routing as the biggest blocker to organic search, because every route looked like the homepage to crawlers, so we moved the site to Astro before launch.

The new site went live on chesswize.com on 29 June 2026, with a 301 redirect for every indexed legacy URL. Paid traffic lands on a separate noindexed page, so ads and organic search never compete for the same visitor.

We published city, state and international pages, a learning hub for parents and a chess news desk, capped at 15 new URLs a week. A batch pauses if more than 20% of it is crawled but not indexed after 28 days, and no location page may ship on fallback copy.

Behind the site we built a demo-booking flow with WhatsApp verification, a lead backup and reconciler that feeds the admin CRM, and an AI support desk on WhatsApp, email and web chat that only ships a change after passing all 30 of its evaluation cases. A security sweep added CSP and HSTS headers, role-based access to personal data and fail-closed rate limits.