+27%
SF-Filter: From Invisible to Indexed
After a full platform redesign, SF-Filter's website was fast, clean, and error-free in the browser. But by Q3 2025, organic visibility had collapsed. Google Search Console showed a site in crisis, and no one could explain why.
ACTUM Digital's Web Health Score found the answer in 54 points.
The challenge
<p data-pasted="true">December 2024, SF-Filter launched a redesigned platform. By every visible measure, it was a success: improved performance benchmarks, clean UI, no browser errors.</p><p>What no one saw: Googlebot was reading a completely different website.</p><p>The migration had introduced deep architectural issues – broken rendering, misconfigured international signals, thousands of legacy URLs lost or redirected incorrectly. Organic traffic, CTR, and rankings dropped sharply. By Q3 2025, almost the entire site was classified as "Poor" in Core Web Vitals.</p><p>This wasn't a content problem. It was a platform-level SEO crisis, and it was invisible to the naked eye.</p>
At a glance
+19%
search impressions
9.3
average position (up from 15.4)
€0
spent on new content
The client
<p data-pasted="true">SF-Filter AG is Europe's leading B2B provider of filtration solutions – 150,000 products, 1M+ filter references, and active markets across Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Poland, and France. With €100M+ in annual revenue and a catalog that spans thousands of product pages in multiple languages, their digital presence isn't a marketing asset. It's infrastructure.</p><p></p>
How Web Health Score identified the gap
<p data-pasted="true">SF-Filter's site scored <strong>54/100</strong> on ACTUM Digital's <a href="/services/websites/web-health-score">Web Health Score</a> – a diagnostic tool that evaluates a website across six dimensions: technical performance, content quality, SEO discoverability, security, AI search visibility, and online authority.</p><p>The score didn't just flag problems. It prioritized them. Instead of a long list of issues, SF-Filter received a clear, dependency-driven roadmap: fix this first, because everything else depends on it.</p>
The recovery: five layers, one direction
Rendering & crawlability
<p>The platform relied on client-side JavaScript rendering. Users saw a fully functional site. Googlebot saw empty shells. We implemented Server-Side Rendering (SSR) so search engines could finally read the product catalog.</p>
International SEO integrity
<p data-pasted="true">Canonical tags and hreflang attributes were misconfigured across all five markets – causing Google to misattribute pages and dilute market-specific authority. We corrected every signal across every locale.</p><p></p>
Catalog architecture
<p data-pasted="true">High-value product pages were buried too deep in the site structure to be crawled efficiently. We rebuilt the sitemap and internal linking to surface the pages that matter most.</p><p></p>
Historical URL recovery
<p data-pasted="true">Thousands of legacy URLs had been redirected incorrectly, severing years of accumulated domain authority. A full redirect audit re-mapped them to the right destinations.</p><p></p>
Core Web Vitals
<p data-pasted="true">Mobile performance sat firmly in the "Poor" category – a direct ranking signal to Google. Lazy loading, image compression, and layout stabilization moved the site from Poor → Good across key metrics.</p><p></p>
The result: growth without new content
<p data-pasted="true">Comparing Oct–Nov 2025 to Aug–Sep 2025:</p><ul><li>Total clicks: <strong>76.8K → 97.5K</strong> (+27%)</li><li>Total impressions: <strong>1.1M → 1.31M</strong> (+19%)</li><li>Average CTR: <strong>7.0% → 7.4%</strong></li><li>Average position: <strong>15.4 → 9.3</strong></li></ul><p>No new articles. No paid campaigns. No content refresh.</p><p>The content was always there. <a href="/services/websites/web-health-score">Web Health Score</a> removed what was stopping Google from finding it.</p>
Technical readiness is your AI-era foundation
<p data-pasted="true">SF-Filter had strong content, a well-funded redesign, and a capable internal team. They still became invisible, because the architecture failed silently.</p><p>In an AI-driven search landscape, this risk is only growing. Models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude don't index pages – they cite sources they can read, understand, and trust. If your site fails those tests, it won't appear in AI-generated answers either.</p>
Turn Insights into Measurable Growth
Web Health Score gives you a clear picture of where you stand – and exactly what to fix first.
- Readiness Assessment – technical performance, security, content quality, AI visibility, and authority signals
- Data-Driven Roadmap – prioritized fixes tied to measurable business impact
- Scalable AI Content – once the foundation is solid, AI-assisted content production at scale
Talk to our experts
Division Director @ ECM
Matěj Pracný
Ready to find your score?
Contact usHaving resolved this critical technical visibility crisis, you can explore how we helped Christies Enterprise Search achieve similar success in our christies enterprise search case study. For broader strategic guidance, discover how to leverage these foundations for effective dam marketing or learn about the impact of How AI in Self-Service Portals Improves Customer Experience on your digital infrastructure.