Session Overview

Sam opened on 2026-05-20 with a request for a web and SEO review before the week ended: pull what shipped that week, what broke, ranking and indexing movement, and the next high-leverage fixes, then turn it into a clean slide deck with screenshots and speaker notes. Success was a review deck usable internally without rebuilding by hand.

The session ran across four turns from 2026-05-20 to 2026-05-27. Turns 1-3 covered the review, 10 fixes, and branded rank recovery execution. Turn 4 was the first automated run of the Branded Rank Recovery Monitor cron (scheduled weekly Wednesdays at 9AM ET).

This session is high priority because it resolved a branded search collapse: "sam aguiar injury lawyers" dropped from position 1.0 to 11.3 in one week, directly tied to out-of-scope schema and title misalignment.

What Was Accomplished

9-slide review deck (Turn 1): Produced with GSC data, site ship log, and ranked next-steps. Speaker notes baked in. Key metrics:

• 779 clicks, down 6% WoW; 124K impressions, down 4%
• Average position drifted 8.5 to 9.1
• Top page: /largest-trucking-companies/ at 300 clicks (+87 WoW, position 4.5)
• Best CTR: /kentucky-pip-reform-2026/ at 6.8%
• Mobile = 69% of clicks; desktop CTR is 6x lower
• Sitemap: 316 pages, 207 posts, 17 categories, all refreshed 5/19, indexing GREEN
• That week shipped 15+ pages in 3 days: 6 location pages (Whitesburg, Prestonsburg, Mayfield, Fort Thomas, Erlanger, Berea), rideshare cluster (Uber/Lyft/DoorDash), motorcycle/bicycle/moped, distracted-driving page, plus 7 posts. Skills consolidated into sail-skills; 3 redundant SEO cron jobs killed.

Top 5 fixes from Turn 1 (all executed in Turn 2):

1. Fix Louisville stats sidebar: phone "(502) 888-8888" rendering as visible text, violates firm-briefing section 8 (header-only phone visibility rule). Fixed: Post 7906 patched, visible phone replaced with "Call Now" button.
2. IndexNow ping for 10 new pages: HTTP 200 success. Search engines notified of all new/updated pages including PIP Reform 2026 hub.
3. Homepage click drop investigation (-38 WoW at stable position): root cause found. WPCode snippet 43605 ("Sitewide Custom SEO Schema") was outputting a 90KB PHP @graph with out-of-scope practice areas. Cleaned: removed Dog Bites, Premises Liability, Burn Injuries, Slip and Falls, FedEx from all knowsAbout and serviceType arrays; removed the Dog Bites Offer block entirely; fixed banned phrase "free consultations 24/7" replaced with "available 24/7"; cleaned 4 ACF homepage flex fields (sec 8/9 left+right) replacing Premises Liability and Dog Bites blocks with Rideshare and Pedestrian, stripped "fight" language.
4. Internal link sweep to PIP Reform 2026 from related practice pages: executed.
5. Orange-accent dark callouts deployed to two header-priority pages: Practice Areas hub (page 48) and Car Accidents practice page (page 30918). Both verified live.

Branded rank collapse discovery (Turn 2): Comparing 5/13-5/19 vs 5/6-5/12: