One of Canada’s largest telecom companies was updating the branding surrounding its most active product. It was a major overhaul that would inevitably involve the reinvention of the product’s name. Given the size of this undertaking, the company had no choice but to completely revamp its website—a move that was going to introduce a significant amount of risk.

As a result, the company was hesitant to embark on such a website migration on its own. Without the appropriate in-house expertise, there was a chance the company could suffer from a major decline in organic traffic. And since the product was bringing in hundreds of thousands of unique visitors to the company’s site each month—and it played an integral role in the company’s success —there was a lot at stake. In light of this, the company understandably wanted to mitigate these associated risks as much as possible, and it decided an external provider was the best way to go.

Because website migration support requires the use of proprietary information—such as source code, data, and analytics—this company wasn’t prepared to hand over the reins to just anyone. It wanted a partner with a long-standing track record, experience in the web migration space, and a stellar reputation. After looking at a few options in the marketplace, the company decided to go with Deloitte.

Deloitte sat down with the company well ahead of the production of the new website to understand the company’s goals and challenges. Then, using SEO best practices, Deloitte designed a complete SEO migration strategy and implemented it over the following six weeks.

In the first three weeks of the project, Deloitte’s SEO migration team conducted a current state analysis—sending bots to crawl the website and ensure all subdomains, domains, URLs, images, and videos were accounted for and adequately mapped out. Next, we determined which URLs should be updated, added, or removed—as well as whether existing URL structures should be renamed for clarity purposes.

The Deloitte team then backed up all old web pages and databases and created the necessary website redirect files, based on the previously completed URL mapping. Following that, the team worked to ensure each page was effectively indexed for Google and other search engines, that the 301 redirect file worked properly, and that all links to old pages were updated.

During this same period, Deloitte also made sure existing site analytics information was accounted for and preserved. The team sat down with stakeholders and identified all existing analytics filters, goals, events, and reports—including custom reports—and mapped the old onto the new. The team also went through all existing users, goals, profiles, and social links to determine if they were still relevant or if new ones needed to be added.

Finally, Deloitte mapped out all tags, triggers, and variables within Google Tag Manager, removed all outdated or irrelevant items, and created new ones where necessary. When the SEO migration team was finished, and the site was up and running, it submitted updated site maps to Google and Bing.

The company’s website ended up relaunching with absolutely no impact on organic traffic. All redirects functioned properly, and Deloitte stayed on to monitor, diagnose, and immediately address any post-launch issues over the following 12 months.

While the company’s traffic was protected, the SEO migration strategy and subsequent support allowed it to realize many more benefits as well. By following SEO best practices, the company was able to ensure that all new content had the strongest keywords and phrases possible, each page had unique title tags, and the entire site was thematically relevant.

Moving forward, the company plans to implement an SEO maintenance strategy to ensure the website continues to provide relevant answers to those who are searching. Deloitte will continue to work with this company to regularly analyze the website and conduct forensics on it, and provide the company with information on what needs to change to support its efforts to gain a higher SEO ranking.