On this page:
1. About the client
SimplyUsed – formerly known as SellYourApple – is a Belgian company that collects and refurbishes old devices like smartphones, tablets and laptops. Via their handy calculator you can quickly find out how much your device is still worth. Depending on the condition, make and age, you’ll receive a personalized offer for your old smartphone or computer.
Via Tijs Van Autreyve SimplyUsed knocked on my door for technical SEO support. Tijs was already in charge of tracking and analytics, and Marjolein Schollaert developed the SEO content strategy. The company underwent several migrations that I helped support, including a domain migration and, later, a major platform migration.
2. The SEO project & my approach
As early as July 2023, I was brought in to run an SEO audit on one specific part of their website: the calculator. It’s their main entry point for winning leads and customers. Here, a potential customer instantly calculates the resale value of their smartphone (often an iPhone), laptop (often a MacBook), or another device, and confirms the sale in the final step. Since the calculator steps involve selecting a category, brand, and model, each of these can serve as a valuable SEO landing page. After analyzing the key search intents, I put together a clear brief covering all the technical SEO requirements, including building indexable pages, the URL structure, on-page SEO (titles, copy, etc.), and more.
In January 2024, planning began for a new website: a fully custom build running on a headless CMS. The client understood, partly thanks to Tijs’s input, that SEO, UX, and CRO need to be involved from the very start. So over the first few months, I met with the team several times to write the technical SEO requirements into the brief. I already knew the current website and the technical limitations of its platform, which let me spell out very concretely what the new platform needed to support from the ground up.
In parallel, a first domain migration took place in April 2024 for organizational reasons. Because the content, front-end, and CMS all stayed the same, the change was kept small, which is exactly how Google likes it. We set up a site-wide redirect, filed a change of address in Google Search Console (plus a few smaller actions), and used a dashboard to track traffic across the old and new domains.
In 2025, I first worked on a separate SEO project for another of their brands. Although a success, it is less relevant to this case study. But it explains why the main website migrated with a delay.
Later in 2025, the plans for the new website picked back up. Among other things, I ran an extensive technical SEO audit of their staging environment. All findings, and especially the action points, were logged as separate tickets in Notion: 40 in total, each describing one technical SEO requirement. Thanks to strong in-house developers, everything was built exactly as specified. As mentioned, Tijs handled tracking and analytics, while Marjolein defined and executed the SEO content strategy, as well as the translations.
3. The results
After the 2024 domain migration, SimplyUsed’s numbers stayed fairly stable, which makes sense since the content hadn’t changed. Within about two weeks, the new domain already had roughly 80 percent of the traffic, and after a good month it matched the previous weekly clicks.
After the platform migration, though, the new website delivered excellent SEO results. Weekly clicks from Google shot up from a baseline of 200 to 750+ per week today. Note: both brand and non-brand traffic grew after the migration, but as you can see lower, 87% of the total is non-brand. I report on total traffic for this project because 73% of clicks get anonymized when you apply a (query) filter to the Google data.
source: gscwatch.com (GSC monitoring & alerting tool)
4. Appendix
Brand / Non-brand ratio
Non-brand traffic in Google Search Console
This view is incomplete, because the new AI-powered non-branded filter has only reported data since February 2026. You can see SEO traffic steeply climbing, but the pre-migration baseline isn’t visible.
A regex filter isn’t much help either, since it loses 73% of the click data.
