Overview
In 2018 Anchor announced they were merging with Hanover (another provider of housing and care for the elderly), to form Anchor Hanover, making them the UK’s largest provider of housing for the elderly. Following the merger, they needed guidance on how to proceed with the two pre-existing domains.
Which is where we stepped in.
OUR SOLUTION
It was quickly decided that merging the two sites would be the best course of action. We then went about devising a SEO migration strategy. Before a full migration to one website, a new domain was set up to house information around the merger, whilst initially keeping the two preexisting domains live.
This would help the new domain to build up visibility for both brand and non-brand queries, meaning the site would have some existing SEO grounding when the consolidation later took place.
For any site redevelopment or migration we follow a rigorous yet agile project outline based on Google best practice guidelines, with steps made to ensure that the new site is technically sound and that traffic and visibility are both carried over to a new site.
For Anchor, the migration project consisted of six key steps:
- Benchmarking of content, traffic and rankings on the existing site
- Initial recommendations
- Redirect mapping
- Pre-launch review and testing
- Launch submission and migration
- Post-launch traffic monitoring and technical review
RESULTS
Following the migration we saw immediate success. We didn’t just maintain results but improved key performance metrics post-launch, also seeing this almost immediately after the migration.
We’re now working alongside the client’s development agency to implement changes to improve site speed. As the care sector is also highly local, we’ll be working throughout the year to implement changes to the site to try and enhance Anchor’s local visibility.
- 18% increase in organic sessions YoY
- 35% increase in conversions YoY
- 110% increase in total organic keywords YoY
