An SEO Case Study
In any good website redesign, the sitemap will change and adjust to the organization’s newest services and goals. This may result in some pages being combined or shelved all together. While 301 redirects can be set up, the sudden disappearance of pages from the internet may lead to low health scores, which can affect SEO and the relationship your website has with Google.
When we worked on the Ibis rebrand Q1 2024, we focused on cleaning up “dusty” pages, but also transferring the website from Wordpress to Squarespace. Once the new site launched, we were tasked at building up the SEO in order to rank for keywords and increase conversions via organic traffic.
Building the Health Score Up
The first big task we undertook was bring the health score up. At the time of the new website launch, the health score was at 15 (out of 100). A majority of this score was in part due to broken links. We transferred over all blog posts from Wordpress, but there were around a hundred blog posts that were in draft mode that needed to be restyled and have the URL slugs match with the previous slugs. AHREFS has a site audit feature that we relied on to constantly check up on the “errors” contributing to the low health score, which details what links exactly were lost, broken, or refound. We spent about 3 months setting up redirects and republishing old blog posts, and by May 2024 we were able to bring the health score up to 97. In October, we hit a perfect 100 score!
Health Score
Increasing Traffic via Blogging
The Ibis content team carefully and topically created newsletter and blog content centered around current events and trends. Since the team wanted to manage this internally, we provided some tips on formatting to ensure maximum SEO friendliness. Tips included:
Compress images and refrain from using GIFs
Utilize H1’s, H2’s, H3’s, H4’s appropriately
Keep URL slugs under 50 characters
Include external links to high DA websites when possible
Due to this high quality, search engine friendly, organic, content, the organic traffic to the website grew from 110 to 190.
Organic Traffic
Increasing the Domain Ranking
Everyone who has ever worked in SEO before knows how difficult it is to raise the Domain Ranking. There is no set of rules to follow where if “X” occurs “Y” (being an increase in the DR” will happen. However, there are general rules of thumb that can help Google trust and rank your site higher. Aside from the aforementioned methods, we focused on building backlinks to the Ibis website in relation to identified keywords. Raising the DR is playing the long game, and within a couple of months we were able to see some progress.
A well designed website along with a consistent SEO game plan (doesn’t have to be too complicated or costly!) can yield growth and results. If you are interested in learning about our SEO services, reach out.
