Background
PAR Technology Corporation builds the technology restaurants and retailers run on: point-of-sale systems, digital ordering, loyalty programs, payment tools, and hardware. It is a large, established company in a competitive space, and a meaningful share of its enterprise leads to come through organic search.
The Challenge
For six months, PAR’s organic performance had been sliding under a previous SEO vendor. Then a major Google algorithm update in June 2024 made it worse. Visibility dropped, momentum stalled, and growth turned negative.
Getting back to the flat was not the goal. PAR needed to reverse the decline, recover the keyword rankings it had lost, and come out the other side with a sustainable path to growth, not a temporary patch.
The Strategy
Search Engine People, the agency brought in to fix it, built a recovery plan around three pieces: technical stability, matching content to what people were searching for, and building authority back up.
Fix the Foundation First
The engagement opened with a full technical and SEO audit: crawl inefficiencies, structural gaps, and missed ranking opportunities. That produced a clear, prioritized list of fixes rather than a vague set of suggestions.
Match Every Page to Real Intent
Each core page went through its own keyword of research instead of chasing broad traffic numbers. The goal was matching search intent to business value, page by page, and sharpening relevance for the competitive enterprise terms PAR needed to win.
Build Authority Back Up
Once the technical and content foundation was solid, the focus shifted to backlink acquisition and authority building, aimed at strengthening PAR’s position in the high-value search results that mattered most.
Implementation
The rollout was phased rather than rushed. Fixes went out in order of priority, and the team moved to the next stage only once the previous one had taken hold. That discipline mattered for a business PAR’s size, where a misstep in enterprise search results is expensive to undo.
The Results
Within four months, measurable traffic increases were visible. Within nine to ten months, organic traffic was back to where it stood before the algorithm updated. From there, growth kept going.
Minimum month-over-month organic growth averaged 10%. Year-over-year growth reached as high as 67%, and compared October 2025 to October 2024 directly, traffic was up 161%. Keyword rankings that had been buried moved up one to three pages on Google.
“Our website has grown in traffic by a minimum of 10% month over month. Comparing October 2025 to October 2024, we saw a growth of 161%. It’s been a phenomenal experience,” said PAR’s Digital Marketing Specialist.
Key Takeaways
The recovery did not come from one big fix. It came from sequencing: solving the technical problems first, then the content problems, then the authority problems, in that order. Skipping ahead to link building before the technical issues were resolved would have wasted the effort.
The plan also resisted chasing broad traffic numbers for their own sake. Matching each page to real search intent meant the traffic that came back was worth having.
Lessons for Other Businesses
A business watching its organic traffic slide after an algorithm update does not need to panic or rebuild the site from scratch. It needs an honest audit of what’s broken, technical, content, or authority, and a plan that fixes them in the right order.
The other lesson is patience with a plan. PAR did not see its full turnaround for the better part of the year. Real recovery from a real drop takes months, and a business that expects results in the first few weeks is more likely to change course too early and undo its own progress.
Rohring Results builds SEO recovery plans the same way: audit first, fix the foundation, then build on top of it, rather than jumping straight to the tactic that sounds fastest. v
