Vamos: from a hacked homepage to €3.54 leads
Vamos rents cars by the month across Spain: choose online, reserve, and the car arrives at your door with insurance, maintenance and taxes included. When we arrived in April 2026, its homepage was carrying casino spam, organic sessions had fallen 55% in six months and GA4 couldn't see a single form fill. We ran the 89-point audit, made the site safe, rebuilt the homepage for the searches that sell renting, and launched the Meta lead campaign that brought in 1,058 leads in its first month.
- €3.54
- Cost per Meta lead1,058 leads from €3,745.53, July 2026
- +83%
- Clicks on "vamos renting"527 vs 288, July vs June 2026
- +262
- Homepage Google clicks878 vs 616, July vs June 2026
- MARKET
- Private drivers, freelancers and businesses across Spain
- STAGE
- Established brand, 2,482 Trustpilot reviews
- ENGAGEMENT
- April 2026 to now
- SERVICES
- Security recovery · Technical SEO · On-page SEO · Paid social · Paid search audit · Tracking
THE CLIENT
A Spanish renting platform with cars from €247 a month, vans and motorbikes, delivered to the customer's door.
THE CHALLENGE
A hacked WordPress site, a 55% fall in organic sessions, 9,111 spec-sheet pages diluting relevance, and no way to measure a lead.
WHAT WE DID
Security recovery, a homepage rebuilt around "renting coches", a Google Ads audit of 8 years and €1.32M, and a Meta lead engine.
THE RESULT
Spam gone, commercial pages climbing again, and 1,058 Meta leads at €3.54 each in July 2026.
THE NORTH STAR METRIC
Qualified renting leads from Spain
Vamos had plenty of traffic that was never going to rent a car: 56% came from Latin America, thousands of visits landed on spec sheets for a 1995 Mitsubishi Pajero, and 44% of July's detected sessions were bots. A lead from a driver in Spain who can actually sign a contract is the only number that pays the bills, so it's the one we steer by.
Three problems, in the order they had to be fixed
There is no point optimising content on a site Google is flagging, or buying traffic you can't measure. The order mattered as much as the fixes.
A compromised site
Casino spam for Sweet Bonanza, 1xSlots and Plinko sat inside the homepage, indexed by Google and showing in Vamos's own search snippets. A second WordPress install, landings.vamos.es, carried a Japanese keyword hack.
A falling search channel
Organic sessions dropped from 49,854 in October 2025 to 22,318 in March 2026. Only about 1 in 10 known URLs was indexed, and 9,111 spec-sheet pages made Google read Vamos as a car encyclopedia.
No way to see a lead
GA4 counted every page view as a conversion and recorded zero form fills and zero phone clicks. There was no Meta Pixel at all.
Renting is now a quarter of Spain's new-car market
More Spaniards pay monthly for a car than ever before, and private drivers and freelancers are the fastest-growing slice. That makes renting searches valuable, and crowded.
1.01M
vehicles in Spain's renting fleet at the end of 2025, up 7%
26.27%
of all new registrations in Spain were renting, Jan–Aug 2026
+10.8%
renting registrations, Jan–Aug 2026 vs the same months of 2025
14.19%
of the fleet is private drivers and freelancers, up 6.23% in 2025
WHO ELSE IS IN THE ANSWER
Renting Finders and Total Renting. Online comparison-style renting brands competing for the same searches.
Arval, Ayvens and Leasys. Bank- and manufacturer-backed renting with big fleets and budgets.
Bipicar. Digital-first renting for private drivers.
Bank renting (CaixaBank and others). Renting sold alongside loans; it converted at 1.31% when Vamos bid on it.
Protect, rebuild, then buy demand
Each layer only works once the one beneath it holds. So the order was security first, search second, paid last.
LAYER 1
Make the site safe
A five-phase clean-up brief for the developers: secure access, remove the injected spam, hunt for backdoors, reinstall clean core files, then clean Search Console and resubmit the sitemap.
LAYER 2
Rebuild for the searches that sell
A homepage built for "renting coches", a spec-sheet clean-up plan, structured data and an authority link from Spanish Wikipedia. City pages and segment pages for private drivers, freelancers and vans come next.
LAYER 3
Buy demand you can measure
Meta Pixel installed, then a lead campaign built around the car models people click on. Google Ads audited across 8 years of history so the budget goes where conversions are proven.
What we found, and what we fixed
We ran Vamos through the 89-point audit using Search Console, GA4, Google Ads, Semrush, Screaming Frog and checks of the live HTML. These are the findings that mattered most, and where each one stands. Everything marked fixed can be checked on the Wayback Machine.
4 PHASES
Where you stand: the questions buyers ask, who AI recommends instead, and which sources it trusts.
Make the site easy for search engines and AI to read, trust and quote.
Get mentioned on the sites AI pulls its answers from.
Re-test the same way every time and track the trend.
MAP
Search demand
FOUND
9,111 indexed spec-sheet pages (Ford F-150, Lada Niva, 1990s models) ranked in the top 5, while vamos.es sat on page two for "renting coches".
WHAT WE DID
Mapped every spec page into keep, noindex or redirect, and started linking the high-traffic ones to cars Vamos actually rents.
MAP
Paid keywords
FOUND
"renting madrid" converted at 16.67% and "renting empresa" at 13%, while broad terms like "renting particulares" spent €8,182 at 2.44%.
WHAT WE DID
Turned proven Google Ads converters into the SEO keyword plan, so organic work targets terms already tested with real budget.
OPTIMIZE
Security
FOUND
Three casino spam blocks (Sweet Bonanza, 1xSlots, Plinko) injected into the homepage, with links to gambling sites, indexed by Google.
WHAT WE DID
Five-phase clean-up briefed to and managed with the developers. The spam was gone from the homepage by 12 May 2026.
OPTIMIZE
Security
FOUND
landings.vamos.es was hit by a Japanese keyword hack, a customer portal was indexed, two subdomains had invalid SSL and no domain sent security headers.
WHAT WE DID
A ten-page developer action plan covering malware removal, SSL, noindex, 2FA, form protection and headers across all four domains.
OPTIMIZE
Homepage
FOUND
The title was "Renting de coches - Vamos", there was no meta description and the page had 9 H1 headings.
WHAT WE DID
New title leading with "Renting Coches Sin Entrada y Todo Incluido | Desde 247€/mes", a written description and one H1.
OPTIMIZE
Entity and schema
FOUND
Organization schema only. No FAQ, no prices, no ratings for Google to show.
WHAT WE DID
FAQPage schema is live. A full graph with LocalBusiness, Service, prices from €247 and the 2,482 Trustpilot reviews is written and with the developers.
OPTIMIZE
Host duplication
FOUND
www.vamos.es and vamos.es both served pages and competed with each other: position 10.4 vs 59 for "renting coches".
WHAT WE DID
Consolidating redirects, canonicals, sitemap URLs and internal links on one host.
OPTIMIZE
Indexing
FOUND
83.2K known URLs, only 10.9K indexed: 45,742 server errors and 13,496 soft 404s.
WHAT WE DID
Workstreams for server errors, template status codes and thin URLs. Counts fall as Google recrawls.
OPTIMIZE
Images
FOUND
83 of the homepage's 93 images had no alt text.
WHAT WE DID
Alt text for the homepage, then the car templates.
AMPLIFY
Authority
FOUND
No editorial citation from the sources AI engines and Google trust most.
WHAT WE DID
Vamos is now a reference on Spanish Wikipedia's car rental article ("Alquiler de automóviles").
AMPLIFY
Paid social
FOUND
No Meta Pixel and no paid social lead flow.
WHAT WE DID
Pixel installed in May. Lead campaign launched 6 July: 1,058 leads at €3.54 each in its first month.
AMPLIFY
Paid search
FOUND
€1.32M spent over 8 years across 383 campaigns. The main campaign showed for 25% of searches, and 8 of the 10 best campaigns ever were paused.
WHAT WE DID
Reactivation and restructure plan: weekend and van campaigns back on, budget moved to proven cities, bank-renting conquest cut.
AMPLIFY
AI visibility
FOUND
No llms.txt, and an AI visibility score of 22/100 in Semrush.
WHAT WE DID
llms.txt written for deployment; ChatGPT referrals tracked separately (261 sessions in July).
MEASURE
Tracking
FOUND
GA4 counted 3.06M "conversions" (page views and first visits) and zero forms or phone clicks.
WHAT WE DID
Event framework for completed forms, click-to-call and availability requests; bots separated with Clarity.
MEASURE
Lead to customer
FOUND
Only 280 of 42,724 Google Ads conversions became customers in HubSpot (0.66%).
WHAT WE DID
HubSpot welcome automation built so every new lead is nurtured. Next: optimise ads on qualified leads, not raw form fills.
The homepage, before and after
The same page captured by the Wayback Machine on 14 April 2026 and 12 May 2026.
SOURCE: Wayback Machine captures of vamos.es, 14 Apr and 12 May 2026; Vamos homepage SEO guide, 29 Apr 2026
How it unfolded
The plan, step by step, including the parts that didn't go to plan.
OCT 2025 – MAR 2026
The fall
Organic sessions fell from 49,854 to 22,318. The homepage was carrying injected casino spam.
MAR 2026
Scope of work
A five-pillar plan sequenced security first: security, technical SEO, on-page, authority, then performance.
2–8 APR 2026
Baseline and clean-up
Every platform benchmarked before any change. Spam clean-up plan issued to the developers.
8–18 APR 2026
Foundations
Spanish Wikipedia citation, schema package, llms.txt, the developer brief and a HubSpot welcome automation.
15–30 APR 2026
The audits
SEO audit, page inventory, social audit, a Google Ads audit of 8 years and €1.32M, and the homepage guide.
BY 12 MAY 2026
Homepage live
Spam gone, new title and description, one H1, FAQ schema and the Meta Pixel.
6 JUL 2026
Meta lead engine
Lead campaign launched across Spain. 1,058 leads at €3.54 each by the end of July.
JUL 2026
Recovery shows
Homepage +262 Google clicks, "vamos renting" +239, private-driver page +30. Technical backlog fully mapped.
What moved
Every figure comes from Vamos's own Search Console, GA4, Microsoft Clarity and Meta Ads Manager. Search Console compares 1–29 July with 2–30 June 2026.
1,058
Meta leads
On-Facebook lead forms, July 2026
€0.40
Cost per click
9,325 clicks, 2.63% CTR
+83%
"vamos renting" clicks
527 vs 288
+262
Homepage clicks
878 vs 616
+33%
Private-driver page clicks
/renting-para-particulares/, 120 vs 90
1.69%
Bing CTR
Up from 1.63%, 918 clicks
SEMRUSH SNAPSHOT · MARCH 2026
Semrush, before the work started: a brand with real authority whose traffic had collapsed.
Semrush estimates from the March 2026 scope of work. The Search Console and GA4 figures above are Google's own.
- 87%
- Estimated traffic drop
- 36
- Authority Score
- 22
- AI visibility score
418K to 55.7K visits from the July 2025 peak
Out of 100
Out of 100
Meta leads by region, July 2026
Where the first month of the lead campaign found people ready to rent.
- Andalusia222
- Cataluña186
- Comunidad Valenciana144
- Comunidad de Madrid129
- Galicia54
- Castilla-La Mancha53
- Castilla y León43
- Región de Murcia42
- Balearic Islands39
- Extremadura34
Meta Ads Manager, campaign "Vamos Leads", 6–31 July 2026. 1,058 leads in total across 18 regions.
Where the clicks came back
Google Search Console, 1–29 July vs 2–30 June 2026. The gains are on the queries and pages closest to a renting decision.
| QUERY OR PAGE | JULY CLICKS | JUNE CLICKS | CHANGE |
|---|---|---|---|
| vamos renting | 527 | 288 | +239 |
| renting vamos | 54 | 37 | +17 |
| vamos renting particulares | 49 | 19 | +30 |
| renting coches | 16 | 9 | +7 |
| Homepage (vamos.es) | 878 | 616 | +262 |
| /renting-para-particulares/ | 120 | 90 | +30 |
| /renting-con-asnef/ | 99 | 87 | +12 |
Total Google clicks were still 16% below June (8.01K vs 9.56K) while server errors and spec-sheet pages are cleaned up. The recovery is in the pages that sell, not yet in the total.
FROM THE FOUNDER
“They've helped us grow organically, improve our paid advertising, and consistently brought fresh ideas and great talent to the table. They felt like a true extension of our team.”
Mario Carranza
Founder and CEO, Vamos
Why it worked
Fix the floor before you buy traffic
Vamos had spent €1.32M on Google Ads while the site underneath was hacked, half-indexed and blind to its own leads. More budget would only have bought more of the same.
So the order was security, then search, then paid. Once the homepage was clean and the Pixel could see a lead, the first Meta campaign brought in 1,058 leads at €3.54 each.
What's next
Leads that sign
Feed HubSpot outcomes back into Meta and Google Ads so both optimise for contracts, not form fills.
Turn the best Google Ads campaigns back on
Weekend (12.21% conversion rate) and vans (€15.69 per lead) first, with budget moved to proven cities.
One host, fewer errors
Finish the www consolidation and bring server errors and soft 404s down as Google recrawls.
City and segment pages
Madrid, Barcelona and Málaga renting pages, plus vans and freelancers, built on the keywords Google Ads proved convert.
SOURCES AND METHOD
- ·Google Search Console, vamos.es: April 2026 report and 1–29 Jul vs 2–30 Jun 2026; page indexing report updated 24 Jul 2026.
- ·GA4 (Vamos PROD): April 2026 report; 1–30 Jul 2026. Microsoft Clarity, last 30 days to 30 Jul 2026. Bing Webmaster Tools, 1–28 Jul 2026.
- ·Meta Ads Manager, campaign "Vamos Leads", 6–31 Jul 2026.
- ·Vamos Google Ads Account Audit, April 2026 (account history Jan 2018 – Apr 2026).
- ·Vamos scope of work (Mar 2026), SEO audit (16 Apr 2026), page inventory, developer action plan and homepage SEO guide (29 Apr 2026).
- ·Wayback Machine captures of vamos.es, 17 Mar – 4 Oct 2026. Spanish Wikipedia, "Alquiler de automóviles", checked 9 Nov 2026.
- ·Asociación Española de Renting de Vehículos (AER) figures via Autofácil (22 Jan 2026) and Motor16 (25 Sep 2026).
Every number on this page is traceable to the source listed. Findings follow the four phases of Rapid North's 89-point AI visibility audit: Map, Optimize, Amplify and Measure.
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