Simonds Homes, a long-standing Australian home builder, has been helping families realize their homeownership dreams since 1949. They have building houses for people living in Victoria, Queensland and South Australia.
THE CHALLENGE
Recently, Simonds has acquired Dennis family Homes and has asked us to conduct SEO migrations to maximise SEO value. The challenge here are how to maximise SEO value from M&A and how to maintain that top page ranks when we are merging content into existing website pages.
Strategy #1: SEO Performance Audit
A search performance audit is the foundation for any website merge. The audit tells you how well each page and piece of content is performing and which keywords have the most value for the sites.
Crawl and gather data: Gather data to identify what our biggest losses/gains could be
Ranking content: Identify the pages that are performing best at driving eyeballs
Converting content: Identify the content that is converting high-quality leads
Keyword rank and value: Identify the keywords and positions that are driving the most traffic.
Strategy #2 :Build up New Pages
From the content and performance audit, we discovered that Dennis Homes has a couple of House & Land pages that are driving majority of traffic where Simonds have not build up those pages. So before we start performing the migration, we build up those pages to prepare for 301 redirects and maximise SEO value.
Strategy #3: Redirects & Tech Audit of staging site
Once we have decided on which pages to build, we source all URLs through screamingfrog, search console and GA4 from Dennis homes and set up redirect mapping to the most relevant or similar pages to maximise SEO value. We also run a technical SEO audit of the staging site to diagnose any crawling and indexing issues before implementing them. We follow a strict migration checklist of steps.
Strategy 4: Monitor Search Console & GA4
Following the redirect process, we actively monitor search console and GA4 traffic report to check on traffic and rankings before and after migrations. Also, we conduct spot testing of redirect to ensure that everything goes smoothly and SEO migration value is maximised.
