Luna Holistic is Calgary’s Reiki and energy-healing centre — a by-appointment wellness studio offering Reiki, sound healing, intuitive readings, and certification courses out of its space on 14th Street NW. The practice was thriving; the website was not being seen. Google was quietly leaving most of Luna’s pages out of search — so the people looking for exactly what Luna offers couldn’t find it.
The challenge: a site Google couldn’t see
Luna came to Big Fox with an indexing and visibility problem, not a content one. The pages were well-written and genuinely helpful, but organic search was delivering a fraction of the traffic the site should have earned. The culprits were two of the smallest, most overlooked files on any website: the XML sitemap and the robots.txt.
It’s a silent failure mode. There’s no penalty and no error message — a broken or incomplete sitemap and an over-restrictive robots.txt simply stop Google from discovering and crawling pages. The site looks fine to a visitor; it’s effectively invisible to the crawler. On a WordPress site especially, a misconfigured sitemap plugin or a stray Disallow rule can hide entire sections of a site without anyone noticing. ‹verify›: exact root cause (malformed sitemap vs. blocking robots rule).
The fix: rebuild both files from scratch
Rather than patch around the problem, we rebuilt the two files cleanly:
- A complete, valid XML sitemap listing every canonical URL we wanted indexed — then submitted directly in Google Search Console.
- A corrected robots.txt that stopped blocking crawlable content and pointed search engines straight at the new sitemap.
- A re-crawl request in Search Console so Google re-evaluated the site immediately rather than waiting on its own schedule.
No new pages. No new content. No link building. Just clearing the path so Google could finally read the site that was already there.
The results: 432% in about ten days
The recovery was almost immediate. Comparing the four weeks before the fix with the days right after, Luna’s Search Console numbers jumped:
- Organic clicks rose 432% — from 72 to 383.
- Impressions rose 342% — from 3,570 to 15,800.
- All within roughly ten days of the rebuild going live.
Those figures are taken straight from the client’s Google Search Console, shown in the before/after comparison on this page. It’s the clearest possible reminder that the biggest SEO win isn’t always more content — sometimes it’s removing whatever is stopping Google from seeing the content you already have.
