State Tourism Organisation
Industry: Travel & Tourism
Project: Large-scale website migration
Scope of Work
In 2022, we successfully assisted a 'State Tourism Client' with a full-scale site migration, ensuring minimal disruption to traffic and search visibility. See below for a case study on how initaitng pre, during and post migration planning created results.
Key Achievement - Case Study
Website Migration & Organic Performance
The Challenge
A major state tourism organisation was undertaking a redesign of its website structure alongside migration to a new CMS platform.
The key challenge was protecting organic performance throughout the migration, ensuring existing rankings, traffic and search visibility were maintained while the new website architecture was introduced.
The site's international structure also created additional technical complexity, particularly around canonical and hreflang implementation.
The Solution
I supported an extensive technical and content audit of the website and developed recommendations covering every stage of the migration.
The work included:
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Conducting pre-migration technical and content audits
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Identifying existing canonical and hreflang issues that could affect organic performance
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Developing SEO best-practice recommendations for the migration
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Supporting implementation before, during and after launch
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Monitoring rankings, traffic and indexation following the migration
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Working closely with development and client stakeholders to identify and resolve post-launch technical issues
Following launch, some key technical recommendations had not been fully implemented, contributing to an initial decline in organic visibility.
I continued to work with stakeholders to demonstrate the impact of the outstanding issues and prioritise fixes. Once the critical canonical and hreflang issues were resolved, organic performance began to recover.
The Results
Following implementation of the recommended fixes:
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Average organic position improved by 8%, from 13.3 to 12.2
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Organic impressions increased by 11%
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Indexed pages increased by 19%
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Rankings and traffic recovered following the initial post-migration decline
The project demonstrated the importance of integrating SEO throughout the full migration lifecycle - from planning and technical auditing through to post-launch monitoring and implementation.
Client details have been anonymised to protect confidentiality.
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