The Challenge
In 2020, Obility’s client acquired a competitor, which gave them a significant traffic boost, but most of this new traffic was either referral traffic from press releases or branded traffic. In other words, this traffic was very top-of-the-funnel and unqualified.
The client’s blog was located on a subdomain and was getting a reasonable amount of organic traffic, but not as much as they wanted. In order to use the blog as a tool to grow qualified traffic to the main website, Obility recommended that the blog gets moved to the main domain to increase traffic, rankings, and domain authority.
The Solution
Site migrations can have disastrous consequences on your SEO performance, so they need to be carefully planned.
Before the blog migration, Obility performed a blog audit to identify any blog posts that were not in line with the client’s strategy, too old or underperforming, and decide to either optimize them or prune them. In the end, 10% of the blog posts were pruned, 23% were migrated as is, and 67% were optimized.
The next step was creating a migration map so the client team knew exactly where to redirect the new and pruned URLs.
Once the migration from subdomain to main domain was effective, Obility ran a technical audit to uncover any technical issues created during the migration and after a few weeks conducted another blog audit to assess the performance of the new blog.
The Results
The blog migration was completed in January 2023. Six months after the blog was migrated to the main website, the organic traffic to the client’s blog was up 75% when compared to the previous time period.
The migration also had a notable impact on the client’s entire website: the traffic is up 38% since the migration, the number of keywords they are ranking for is up 56%, and the number of SERP features went up from 0 in January 2023 to 797 in July 2023!