SEO advice is everywhere. Reliable evidence is harder to find.
Case studies usually highlight successful projects. Inconclusive tests rarely become articles, and when traffic increases, several changes may have been made simultaneously. That makes it difficult to know which individual tactic deserves the credit.
This is what makes The SEO Meta Study, published by Krešimir Ćorluka of Croatian agency Ovisy, particularly interesting.
The study began with more than 30,000 documents related to SEO, AEO and GEO. After filtering and analysis, it included:
The study does not present those tactics as a universal checklist. It separates evidence strength from actionability and repeatedly warns that something working on one website does not mean it will work everywhere.
It was published several months after we completed a major website migration and SEO project for Future Stars Summer Camps. We did not use the study to plan our strategy. However, after reading it, we noticed that many of its better-supported findings closely matched decisions we had already made.
That gave us an opportunity to compare the study’s findings with our own results.
Future Stars offers more than 35 sports, arts and STEAM programs across multiple camp locations. Its previous website had become difficult to update and navigate, with hundreds of pages and a large collection of aging blog content.
The migration gave us an opportunity to reconsider the entire search experience rather than simply move the existing website to a new platform.
The project covered close to 450 pages and included content cleanup, a redesigned location and program structure, rewritten copy, internal linking, redirects and structured data.
Comparing January through August 2026 with the same period in 2025, Future Stars recorded:
This was not a controlled test. The migration introduced numerous improvements together, and external factors such as seasonality and changes in search results also affected performance. We cannot assign the overall increase to one tactic.
What we can do is compare the work with tactics supported by the wider body of evidence.
One of our most important migration decisions concerned what not to move.
The existing Future Stars blog contained more than 100 thin, outdated or no longer useful posts. Instead of transferring every URL simply because it existed, we reviewed the content and decided which posts should be retained, updated, consolidated, redirected or removed.
The SEO Meta Study found support for consolidating repetitive pages, merging old content, removing duplicate copy and expanding pages that still serve a useful search intent.
The Future Stars results were consistent with that direction.
Despite removing more than 100 posts, blog visibility did not decline. From January through August 2026:
Several retained articles also experienced substantial growth. This suggests that the cleanup helped preserve useful resources while reducing the amount of content that no longer had a clear role.
It does not mean deleting content improves SEO by itself. Older pages may still have rankings, links or seasonal value. Removing them without reviewing those signals can destroy useful equity.
The takeaway is more specific: preserving every old page is not automatically the safest migration strategy. In this case, a smaller and more intentional content library produced substantially greater search visibility.
Future Stars presented a complicated structural challenge.
Parents may search by location, activity or age group. A family might look for a summer camp in Garden City, a basketball camp on Long Island or programs suitable for a younger child. At the same time, not every program is offered at every camp location.
A flat collection of pages was never going to be enough.
We reorganized the website around the relationships between locations and programs. Location pages showed the activities available at that camp, while program pages helped families identify where a particular activity was offered.
Internal links connected:
The meta-study found support for improving site structure, building topical content hubs and cross-linking pillar pages with supporting content.
The objective was not to publish every possible program-and-location combination. Pages were created where Future Stars had a real offering and enough distinct information to help families make a decision.
The resulting structure helped search engines understand the website, but it also made a large catalog easier for parents to navigate. Internal linking was not treated as an optimization task added after launch. It was built into the new architecture.
Local visibility is central to Future Stars. Parents are not looking for just any camp. They need one within a realistic distance from home or work.
Each camp therefore needed a dedicated page with accurate information about its programs, age ranges, dates, venue and location.
We also worked to connect those pages with Google Business Profiles and other local signals. Location-specific structured data helped describe each camp’s name, address, phone number, coordinates, hours and relationship to the parent organization.
The SEO Meta Study includes evidence supporting dedicated location pages, synchronized directory listings, local profile improvements, structured data and review-generation efforts.
Future Stars saw particularly strong local results after the migration:
Non-branded local rankings also improved. Several established locations moved closer to the top of the first page for searches containing “summer camp,” while the new Sayville location began generating organic visibility during its first season.
No single element produced these results. Schema cannot compensate for weak location content, and a Google Business Profile cannot completely replace a competitive organic landing page.
The improvement came from treating each legitimate location as a distinct local entity while keeping it clearly connected to the Future Stars brand.
A migration can preserve existing content word for word. It can also preserve every weakness in that content.
We used the Future Stars migration to rewrite and expand important pages, review titles and headings, and make sure each page answered the practical questions parents were likely to have.
The work was not about making every page longer or repeating target keywords. It was about helping visitors quickly understand:
The meta-study found support for updating outdated facts, filling information gaps, improving titles and metadata, aligning pages with search intent and replacing repetitive keyword use with more natural semantic coverage.
The improvement in rankings suggests that the new pages gave Google a clearer understanding of the site. Future Stars more than doubled its number of keywords in the top three positions, while its average keyword position moved onto the first page.
However, the data also showed where more work was needed. Much of the organic traffic continued to come from people already searching for Future Stars by name. Some location pages still depended heavily on their Google Business Profiles instead of competing strongly in regular organic results.
The migration improved the foundation. It did not eliminate the need for continued content development.
The overlap between the meta-study and the Future Stars project is encouraging, but it is not proof that each tactic independently produced a specific percentage increase.
Content, site architecture, internal links, redirects, local optimization and structured data were improved as part of the same project. The results belong to that combination.
This limitation is not unique to our case. The SEO Meta Study reports that 92 of its 182 entries include at least one source where several things changed but only one outcome was measured. In those cases, the result supports the complete package rather than any single component.
There is also publication bias. Agencies and SEO teams are more likely to publish projects that performed well than projects that failed or produced no clear change.
Evidence still matters. It simply needs to be interpreted in context.
The value of The SEO Meta Study is not that it provides 182 instructions for every website to follow. It shows which practices have produced measured outcomes, how much evidence exists behind them and where the limitations remain.
The Future Stars migration offers a real-world comparison. We completed the work before the study was published, based on the condition of the website, the needs of the business and the way parents searched for summer camps.
Looking back, many of our decisions aligned with the study’s stronger findings:
Those are not isolated SEO tricks. They are coordinated responses to specific problems.
A study can tell us what has worked elsewhere. Strategy still requires someone to understand the website, determine what fits, implement it responsibly and measure what happens next.