Case Study: 2.5X Increase in Blog Traffic After Site Migration

THE CLIENT

A travel insurance company that offers customized travel insurance and 24/7 emergency medical and travel assistance for individuals and groups.



THE CHALLENGE

This client website faced a series of challenges, including:

  • Hundreds of URLs were in the in the top folder hurting SEO value and link equity

  • The top folder was using the majority of the crawl budget

  • Product pages were hidden in the secondary folder beneath a bloated top folder

  • No organizational, hierarchical structure of folders making it difficult for crawlers to find the information they need to show in search results

  • Blog URL structures were inefficient, as they were named categorically by year, month, day (ie: example.com/blog/2020/04/25/blog-title-here)

  • Valuable, quality blog content was hidden in the deepest levels of the crawl, therefore receiving little to no link equity.


These challenges made it difficult to achieve the client’s goals of increasing organic traffic, and search visibility, and conversions on the site.



THE STRATEGY

The first step the Statwax team took was to analyze the site structure and look to implement a hierarchical organization to the site architecture that made it easier for search engine crawlers to easily find the client’s content, know what it was about, assess a page’s authority, and understand a searcher’s intent.

This process began with our team analyzing the way search robots were crawling the client’s website and looking at the website’s navigation from the perspective of a human user. Both perspectives are important to ensure a site is serving its two main audiences – search engine bots that crawl websites to appropriately rank pages for search results and human customers who need to have a positive user experience with a website to purchase the product or find useful information.

Our team then identified ways to reorganize the website structure to meet the above-mentioned objectives, including how to group pages and URLs, proper URL naming, and how to distribute equity across category subfolders. The Statwax team used this analysis and auditing process to create a redirect roadmap for the site migration. The roadmap, put together by the team, laid out the following steps for a successful migration, which were implemented by the client’s marketing and IT teams while the in-house Statwax SEO team constantly audited the site and monitored site health during the process. In total, the process involved several steps, including:

  • Evenly and effectively distributing link equity by creating main category folders across the entire website. Product pages were prioritized the highest to get the most value.

  • Pages with lower organic traffic and low SEO value were moved or “hidden” in lower level subfolders which helped lower crawl budget and priority on crawl.

  • Blogs were organized by category (news, destinations, insurance advice, travel tips) so that equity was evenly distributed.

  • FAQ (which tends to be very valuable SEO content) was prioritized in the crawl depth and placed at the top sub-folder.


THE RESULTS

Overall

  • Organic blog traffic increased by 157% YoY in the six months following implementation

  • Increased organic traffic by 14% YoY despite impacts of the pandemic on the travel industry

  • e-Commerce conversion rates increased 10% through organic traffic alone

YoY Results (Dec 22, 2020 – June 22, 2021, 2021 vs. dec 22, 2019 – June 22, 2020)

        • Blogs saw 139% increase in organic users total

        • A 159.36% increase in NEW organic users was generated

        • Sessions increased by 151%

Previous Period Results (Dec 22, 2020-Jun 22,2021 vs. Jun 22, 2020-Dec 21, 2020)

        • Blogs experienced a 41.11% increase in organic new users

        • The new site architecture generated a 39.75% increase in organic users total