Business Acquisition Meets SEO: Navigating a Site Migration
Duck Creek provides SaaS solutions for the P&C and general insurance industry.
Key Results
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Key Deliverables
- Pre-migration support and collaboration with client.
- Website review and URL mapping to create a 301 redirect strategy to ensure maintenance (or improvement) of traffic and rankings.
- Data visualisation and reporting to validate the results.
- Post-migration check-ins at weeks 1 and 2, and months 1, 2, and 3 to ensure rankings were stable and traffic wasn’t declining (in this case, visibility had increased).
If you’ve read our SEO migrations page, you’ll know they come in all shapes and sizes. This case study about Duck Creek—a P&C and general insurance solution platform—is an example of an acquisition-type migration.
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Keep reading to discover how we helped the folks at Duck Creek absorb a new site into their own without skipping a beat.
A Side Note About Acquisition-Type Migrations
When we say acquisition-type migration, we mean that a company acquisition has happened in real life, and the SEO migration is the process of deciding how to fold the acquired site into the main site without interrupting either site’s traffic or rankings.
Now, on with the show!
The Challenge
- Duck Creek acquired a company offering a different service, so both sites were running parallel…that is, until Duck Creek decided to offer the same type of service.
- There was no strategy for keeping both websites without starting a competition.
- The marketing team needed help handling the finer details of the migration, e.g., redirects, content, etc.
Before we were even a twinkle in Duck Creek’s eyes, they acquired Imburse Payments, a company offering a completely different service; a fact that worked out for everyone involved because that meant that Duck Creek could continue running Imburse and its own site as normal.
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But then, our friends took on a new business venture, and Duck Creek Payment Solutions was about to be released, meaning that suddenly, its own site was poised to become a competitor.
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That’s when the team asked for our help. They needed to take action to not compete with themselves. Kudos to them for knowing when to ask for help.
The Solution
- Review the acquired site’s Google Search Console data to compare services and copy the most relevant and high-value pages to the main site.
- Create a URL map of all pages on the old site and establish a set of 301 redirect rules.
- Push new pages live one week before the migration to allow them to be indexed before redirecting all that traffic.
We reviewed the Imburse Payments Google Search Console data and pinned down the pages with the most traffic around the ‘payment solutions’ queries. The Duck Creek team then cross-referenced those pages to see what information did or did not align with the service they were about to offer. Then, they copied the most relevant and highest-value pages to their website (but didn’t publish them just yet).
Concurrently, we mapped out all the pages on the old site that had received organic traffic and made sure the pages that had like-for-like replacements would be 301 redirected to their equivalents. As for the other pages, we redirected them to either the Duck Creek homepage or press releases about the acquisition from the previous year.
Since Duck Creek was a high-traffic site, we estimated (correctly) that indexation wouldn’t take too long, so we pushed the new pages live a week before the migration to allow them to be indexed in time for the new service announcement.Â
On the day the new service was announced, we implemented all the redirects, performed a change of address in Google Search Console, and waited to see the results.
The Results
- All new pages on the main site were indexed and ranking on page one
- +1000% increase in clicks for the new service term
- Visibility improved from day one
The migration worked a treat. All the new pages on the Duck Creek site were indexed and ranking on page one in almost exactly the same position as the previous site. Traffic, as you can see from our Looker Studio screenshots, increased.Â
The screenshots also show how Duck Creek gained visibility in Google Search almost immediately after the migration, with ongoing improvements over time. Traffic went from almost nothing to meaningful numbers of clicks each day—and that’s even more impressive when you remember that these pages are highly transactional and closely related to their services, and not top-of-funnel informational queries… (not to mention how competitive those queries actually are).
Overall, this was a straightforward acquisition-type SEO migration with a clear solution. It just goes to show that if you work with the right people, what was once an overwhelming task suddenly becomes just another day at the office.
Final Thoughts
This is not an especially complicated example of a migration, but then again, migrations don’t have to be (and even shouldn’t be) that complex. The customer wanted to absorb all the service-related traffic from another site, and this well-executed plan did exactly that.
See more results
- Back to Results
- Conidia case study
- i3-Technologies case study
Key Deliverables
- Pre-migration support and collaboration with client.
- Website review and URL mapping to create a 301 redirect strategy to ensure maintenance (or improvement) of traffic and rankings.
- Data visualisation and reporting to validate the results.
- Post-migration check-ins at weeks 1 and 2, and months 1, 2, and 3 to ensure rankings were stable and traffic wasn’t declining (in this case, visibility had increased).
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