TLDR
- Who: The Happiest Hour, an Australian marketplace connecting users with pub events, specials, and offers via web and app.
- What changed: A botched 2023 site rebuild wiped their location pages and rankings, so we ran technical, on-page, and content SEO to rebuild a clean marketplace URL structure and recover organic search.
- The number: 324.31% increase in app first-open conversions from organic search over four months (December 2023 to April 2024).
324.31%
Increase in Conversions
78.54%
Increase in Organic Traffic
169%
Increase in Top Ranking Keywords
About The Happiest Hour
The Happiest Hour is a platform that connects users with pub events, specials, and offers throughout Australia, available on both its website and its app.
They came to NUOPTIMA to fix their organic performance. The pandemic had cost them traffic while pubs were closed, and in the middle of 2023 a website rebuild triggered a second decline. They wanted an outside team with real marketplace SEO experience: someone who could rank thousands of dynamic, multi-listing pages in the SERPs rather than treat the site like a handful of static pages. This is the exact multi-listing problem our technical SEO work is built for.
Team
The Happiest Hour Team
Joonas Karppinen
CEO and Co-Founder
Louis du Pisani
Growth Lead
Responsible NUOPTIMA Team
Aman Ghataura
Head of Growth
Adrijana Palatinus
SEO Lead
George Ilich
Head of Business Development & Clients
Website Performance Before Hiring NUOPTIMA
The Happiest Hour enlisted our services in December 2023. To understand the results, it helps to see the state of the site at that point.
The mid-2023 rebuild had gone wrong. The SEO migration lost pages, specifically the "specials [location]" pages such as "specials Melbourne" and "specials Sydney," which were exactly the pages that drove their target keyword rankings.
The screenshot below shows their lost pages (the gray URLs):
With those pages gone, the keyword rankings went with them:
On top of that, most of the site's pages had been redirected, compounding the loss:
A few months after the rebuild, in December 2023, The Happiest Hour brought us in to diagnose and fix it.
What We Did
Once we understood the damage, we set an action plan and worked through technical SEO, on-page SEO, and content fixes. The table below breaks down each step, the goal, the actions, and the effect. Rebuilding a clean, crawlable marketplace URL structure is the backbone of any SEO program for a listings site.
| Steps NUOPTIMA Conducted | Goal | Actions Involved | Impact |
| Redirect Issues | To ensure that all site traffic is directed to the most current and secure version of the website, i.e., "HTTPS," not "www." | We implemented 301 redirects across various old and unsecured versions of The Happiest Hour's URLs to unify and secure the site's URL structure. | The implemented redirects prevented split-page rank and secured all site entries. This boosts SEO integrity and increases user trust. |
| Sitemap Issues | To clean and optimize the sitemap for better crawling efficiency. | We reviewed and trimmed invalid URLs from the sitemap. We included valid orphan pages in the sitemap and established internal links to integrate them into the site structure. We removed or redirected non-indexable and outdated URLs. | This enhanced site crawling and indexing, which facilitated better content discovery by search engines, such as Google. |
| Site Architecture & User Experience (UX) | To improve site navigation and UX. | We redesigned homepage sections to prominently feature "Trivia Nights" and "Events" with direct calls-to-action (CTAs). We modified the "/specials" page to prioritize list views over map views with toggle functionality. We enhanced overall navigation by making entire venue cards clickable. | These fixes improved user engagement and increased session durations, directly contributing to lower bounce rates and higher conversions. |
| In-Depth Keyword Research & Content Strategy | To gain rankings and improve visibility for the "Specials" page. | We conducted deep keyword research and carefully crafted a content strategy. Based on our keyword research and content strategy, we introduced a clean URL structure specifically tied to cities, specials types, and weekdays (instead of the client's filtered URLs). | This increased organic traffic and improved rankings for the "Specials" pages, resulting in higher visibility and engagement from targeted audiences. |
| Page Titles & Meta Descriptions | To optimize meta tags to better target primary keywords and improve click-through rate (CTR). | We revised page titles and meta descriptions to meet the necessary length and relevance standards. | This resulted in increased visibility and CTR from SERPs. |
| H1 Heading Optimization | To strengthen on-page SEO by optimizing header tags. | We corrected and implemented unique and relevant H1 tags across all pages. | This improved content structure, which facilitated better UX and search engine comprehension. |
| Not Found (404) Errors | To address and minimize the impact of 404 errors. | We restored valuable missing content and implemented 301 redirects or 410 statuses where appropriate. | This step reduced user frustration and prevented ranking losses as a result of broken links. |
Working through these steps in order rebuilt both the UX and the underlying SEO foundation of the site.
Results
The Happiest Hour engaged us in December 2023 and remained a client as of June 2024, when this data was recorded. The results below cover the four-month window from December 2023 to April 2024.
Conversions
Start with key events (conversions). A key event is an action you want a user to take. For The Happiest Hour, the metric is "first opens," triggered when a user launches the app for the first time after installing it. Comparing the point they engaged us against four months later, first opens from organic search rose 324.31%:
Organic Traffic
Next, organic traffic, meaning visitors who land on the site from unpaid sources:
This Ahrefs screenshot tracks the climb in organic traffic. The first line on the left marks the start of our collaboration, and the second marks the start of our audit implementation.
Here are the numbers:
In December 2023, The Happiest Hour was generating roughly 6.6K organic visitors. By April 2024, that had grown to almost 12K, a 78.54% increase over the four-month period.
Engaged sessions climbed alongside it. These are sessions lasting longer than 10 seconds, with at least two screenviews or pageviews, or a key event. Over the same period, engaged sessions from organic search were up 109.4%.
Together this points to a more visible, more engaging, more usable site, with the traffic and engagement gains to match.
Total Clicks, Total Impressions, and Average SERPs Position
Now the Search Console picture for The Happiest Hour between December 2023 and April 2024:
- Total Clicks: The number of times users clicked the site's URL from the SERPs rose from 6.61K to 12.3K, an 86% increase, meaning many more users are clicking through from search.
- Total Impressions: How often a page appeared in search results nearly doubled, from 515K to 920K, an almost 80% increase. The site is showing up more often and across a broader range of queries.
- Average Position: The average ranking across the SERPs improved from 17.6 to 14.9, better visibility that typically feeds back into more clicks and traffic.
Keyword Rankings
Finally, how keyword rankings shifted from December 2023 to April 2024:
Organic keywords grew from 14,354 in December to 19,516 in April, a gain of more than five thousand. These are the terms bringing in free organic traffic.
Keywords in the top three positions went from 65 in December to 175 in April, a 169% increase.
Rankings in positions four to 10, 11 to 20, 21 to 50, and 51 to 100 nearly all rose as well, widening the site's visibility across the full range of search queries. Recovering marketplace rankings at this scale is what our SEO team does across listings and multi-page platforms.
Key takeaways
- A site rebuild without an SEO migration plan can erase years of rankings overnight. The Happiest Hour lost its "specials [location]" pages and every keyword tied to them in the 2023 rebuild, and recovery started only once the URL structure was rebuilt cleanly. Get technical SEO reviewed before you migrate, not after.
- For a marketplace, the URL structure is the product. Tying clean URLs to cities, specials types, and weekdays, rather than filtered query URLs, is what let thousands of dynamic pages rank and drove a 78.54% organic traffic gain from December 2023 to April 2024.
- Organic visibility converts. The same four-month window that lifted traffic 78.54% also drove a 324.31% rise in app first-open conversions from organic search, showing that SEO gains land on the metric that matters, not just impressions.
If your listings site or marketplace lost rankings in a migration, or you want to rank thousands of dynamic pages the right way, book a call and we will walk you through it.