Found $1.8M of leaking revenue in a forensic audit. Captured 70% in 6 months — without changing the product.
Statera runs a wealth-management platform for mass-affluent clients ($250K–$2M household assets). They had product-market fit, strong unit economics, and 47K monthly visits — but their checkout abandon rate was 73%, schema was wrong on commercial pages, and a 2024 algorithm update had quietly cut their organic position 3.2 ranks across 80 commercial keywords. We ran a 14-day forensic audit that surfaced $1.8M of annualized leaking revenue. Six months of focused fixes captured 70% of it without touching the product.
Statera came to us with…
Statera came to us during a board crisis. New competitors had launched, organic traffic had declined 19% over two quarters, and the founders were being pressured to either acquire growth via paid (with bad unit economics) or accept slower growth than projected. They wanted a third opinion before making the spend decision. We told them: don't increase paid spend, fix the leaks first.
Organic decline of unknown cause
GSC showed −19% impressions and −24% clicks across 6 months. No public algorithm update fully explained it. The previous team had been chasing the symptom (write more content) without diagnosing the cause.
Checkout abandonment
73% of users who started the account-opening flow abandoned. The CRO had been told 'this is industry standard'. It wasn't — peers were at 38–45%.
Compliance-heavy CRO
Every conversion-funnel change had to be reviewed by compliance + legal before deployment. We needed an experimentation flow that respected this without bottlenecking on it.
No revenue attribution
Revenue was tracked at the company level. Per-channel, per-page, per-keyword attribution was non-existent, so they couldn't tell which efforts moved the number.
The approach
Forensic audit + revenue model
Crawl + indexation + schema audit, plus a deep funnel analysis from first touch to funded account. We found the cause of the organic decline (a Q3 schema change broke FAQ rich results across 130 commercial pages) and 23 funnel friction points. The revenue model put dollar values on every fix.
- 47-page forensic SEO + CRO audit
- Funnel friction map (23 friction points)
- $-weighted opportunity model ($1.8M annualized)
- Schema audit + fix plan (130 pages)
- Compliance-friendly experimentation playbook
Schema + indexation + on-page fixes
Restored FAQ schema across 130 commercial pages. Fixed 6 indexation bugs that were keeping conversion-critical pages out of search. Rewrote 47 pages where commercial-intent gap was widest. Rankings recovered within 6 weeks.
- Restored FAQ schema on 130 pages
- Fixed 6 indexation bugs
- Rewrote 47 commercial pages
- GSC monitoring dashboard
- Recovery: rankings back to baseline by week 6
CRO sprint — the abandonment problem
Compliance-friendly experiment framework: every test pre-approved by legal in batches, pre-registered hypotheses, fixed sample sizes. We ran 11 experiments. 7 won. The biggest single move was breaking the 9-step account-opening into 3 stages with persisted progress — 73% abandon dropped to 41% in 4 weeks.
- 11 CRO experiments (7 winners)
- 3-stage account opening with persisted progress
- Trust-signal placement rework
- Mobile-first checkout redesign
- Compliance-pre-approved variant library
Power BI revenue attribution
Built a Power BI semantic model on top of their warehouse (Snowflake + Segment) so they could see revenue by channel × ICP × landing page in real time. CFO now reviews it weekly. CRO uses it to decide where the next experiment goes. Board now has audit-grade attribution.
- Power BI semantic model + DAX library
- Revenue attribution dashboard (channel × ICP × LP)
- RLS for execs, BoD, ICs
- Weekly automated CFO email
- Board-ready monthly export
Before / after — every metric
Numbers verifiable with the client. Audit trail available on request.
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Checkout abandonment rate | 73% | 41% | −44% |
| Account-opening completions / month | 412 | 964 | +134% |
| Revenue per organic visitor | $1.84 | $3.91 | +112% |
| Organic impressions (GSC) | 320K/mo | 470K/mo | +47% |
| Average position (commercial KWs) | 8.7 | 5.5 | −3.2 |
| FAQ rich result coverage | 12 pages | 142 pages | +1,083% |
| CRO experiments shipped (monthly) | 0.5 | 2.2 | +340% |
| Annualized revenue captured | — | $1.26M | 70% of leak model |
Stack, team, and tools
- · Next.js (existing)
- · Snowflake
- · Segment
- · Power BI
- · Optimizely (CRO)
- · Plausible Analytics
- · 1 senior strategist
- · 1 SEO operator
- · 1 CRO specialist
- · 1 Power BI consultant
- · 1 compliance liaison
- · Ahrefs
- · GSC
- · Hotjar
- · Optimizely
- · Snowflake
- · Power BI Desktop
- · Tableau (legacy, deprecated)
We came to SERP Axis ready to triple our paid spend. They told us not to. They found $1.8M of leaking revenue in two weeks of audit work. We've recovered 70% of it in six months. The CFO uses their Power BI dashboard every Monday morning. Best decision we made all year.
“The revenue attribution dashboard alone changed how we run the business. Before, I couldn't tell the board which channel was working. Now I can — by ICP, by quarter, by retention cohort.”
Year-2 expansion into the institutional segment, plus a churn-prediction ML model on top of the existing Power BI semantic layer. Already scoped — kicking off month 7.
The cost of waiting
is your competitor.
Every 90 days you delay is 90 days of authority compounding for someone else. Get the audit. See the math. Then decide.