HireRoad Merged 3 Domains AND Rebranded, with NO Organic Traffic Loss
Marketing executives often expect to lose 20-50% of their SEO traffic after a major website project. But Profound Strategy’s holistic approach to website migrations allowed HireRoad to keep their organic traffic stable through a multi-domain migration and simultaneous rebrand.
HireRoad is an HR analytics and talent management platform that provides organizations with the right data to make informed decisions about who to hire and how to retain them.
In 2020 and 2021, HireRoad (then Acendre) was growing quickly, acquiring multiple companies to add to their suite of solutions. Profound Strategy had already helped the team through one successful acquisition and site merger, and was actively engaged for SEO growth.
By the end of 2021, Acendre was drawing up plans to rebrand as HireRoad and simultaneously merge two more newly acquired brands into the site. Profound Strategy got to work on a uniquely complicated zero-loss migration project.
Our first site migration with Profound Strategy was one of the easiest projects I’ve ever been a part of. Doing it again after our next acquisition just made sense.
Challenge: A high-risk, multi-domain migration and rebrand
Even under normal circumstances, website migrations are stressful, and the risk to organic traffic is high. Inexperienced marketers can lose up to half of their organic traffic during a simple 1:1 migration.
Organic traffic to one of the Ascendre domains was gaining momentum from Profound Strategy’s SEO Certified Content work, but those opportunities had not fully matured. The two newly acquired brands being merged—Inquisiq and VacancyFiller—were smaller domains to begin with.
“My personal motto through this was, No SEO left behind,” said McAvoy. “We needed to keep every bit of relevant traffic from all three brands.”
Challenge: Small Team of Contracted Experts
Dawn McAvoy was effectively the only in-house marketer available for the project. She put together a team of fractional and agency experts—bringing together the best SEOs, devs, designers, and more.
The challenge of assembling any new, remote team, though, is coordination.
Solution: Support for a guaranteed no-loss migration
Profound Strategy provided a multi-pronged solution to HireRoad’s complex migration needs:
Content Audit
A full sweep of each domain and subdomain would give HireRoad a clear picture of their vast, three-site content library.
Robust 301 Redirect Map
An easy-to-parse spreadsheet planned to map each existing URL from three domains to its future URL on one new, unified domain to ensure every page was appropriately redirected and maintained its organic traffic.
Pre-launch technical SEO audit
A thorough review of the HireRoad.com site would aim to identify and prioritize mission-critical technical issues before the site went live.
Pre-launch Redirect Audit and QA
A careful test of almost 1,000 strategic 301 redirects would ensure they worked properly before the new site launched.
Immediate post-launch Technical SEO Audit and QA
A detailed review of robot.txt files and all URLs from the old site, plus a manual review of top-priority pages from the old sites, was planned, to ensure all was well when the migration went live.
Post-launch monitoring
Daily monitoring of the new site—with mission-critical issues addressed immediately—for four weeks is standard to further ensure success.
“Whether it’s a few hundred pages or a few hundred thousand pages, maintaining organic traffic during a site project is always the same. You just need the right checklist and you need to make sure you go over it twice.”
– CJ Caponi, Lead Technical SEO Analyst
Solution: Clear, Cross-Agency Collaboration
Profound Strategy provided one centralized document with a prioritized, detailed, and concise list of what actions needed to happen—and the risks of not doing them—before hitting the launch button.
When timelines got tight, Dawn asked the Profound Strategy team to work directly with other contractors and keep her informed, so that’s what we did.
“Our team was spread out, geographically,” said McAvoy, “but I didn’t need to be in the middle. I was briefed, I was kept informed of everything going on, but I wasn’t a bottleneck. Profound Strategy made that really easy.”
Clear, open communication kept a complicated project very streamlined.
Result:
HireRoad’s New Site Outperforms SEO Expectations by 14.5%
Profound Strategy’s robust migration support strategy successfully merged three domains into one new brand—with a little more organic traffic than expected.
Ahead of the migration, McAvoy and her team identified a large portion of content, across all three domains, they wanted to purge due to irrelevance—a move that would inevitably impact traffic.
Profound Strategy analysts used our custom SEO traffic forecast model to illustrate what the year-over-year traffic for the new domain should be after a flawless migration. One year later, traffic to the site exceeded expectations by 14.5% and had never dipped below anticipated traffic levels.
Result:
A Seamless Site Migration
Profound Strategy’s clear, concise audit findings and recommendations alleviated the anxiety and uncertainty that migrations create. Open communication made it easy to keep naturally siloed teams connected, and keep the work moving in order to hit the go-live deadline.
“Profound Strategy made it really easy. I gave the team the situation and a timeline, and they just said, ‘We’ll figure it out.’ It was so refreshing.”
– Dawn McAvoy
In fact, HireRoad’s the project was so successful, Dawn and her team reached out with another migration-support need less than one year later when they acquired yet another brand.
Zero Loss Migration Support
Are you working on a site project and worried about organic traffic? Whether you’re merging domains because of an acquisition, rebranding, moving content, or reorganizing the site, technical SEO support is crucial.
A poor content migration or relaunch can have a negative impact on organic performance for years. Don’t risk it. Contact us today for a free consultation.
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