Businesses change. Pivots, rebrands, technology platforms--these are all reasons you might need to migrate a website.

Starting from scratch afterwards doesn't have to be an option.

When done correctly, you can retain and redirect all the traffic from your old site to your new site--even traffic from search engines.

The client

This client launched a rebranded website and contacted Inflo for search engine optimization. The rebranded site wasn't gaining as much traction as they had hoped, and the old site was beginning to struggle due to lack of attention.

The strategy

After reviewing the two sites, we decided it made sense to phase out the old site and redirect all their traffic to the new site.

This approach has several benefits:

• Easier technical maintenance
• Focused marketing that builds on past success
• Simplified analytics attribution

This adds up to serious cost savings as well. It might make sense for large corporations to maintain several brands, but for most start-ups and small businesses, it doesn't.

The result

Since the client's old site still had brand recognition, we decided on a gradual migration. We started with informational content pages and eventually migrated the home page in early 2017.

The migration began the last week of August 2016. By March 2017, SEO traffic to the new site had improved 300% over August preceding the start of the migration.

Pages that didn't received any migrated traffic also benefited. These pages received 210% more traffic in the March 2017 compared to August 2016.

Migrating the site allowed this client to build on past success. Instead of trying to build up an entirely new site with prolonged link building efforts and creating tons of new content, we were able to leverage the existing strength of the old site to bolster the efforts of the new site.