Comwell, a prominent hotel chain in Denmark and Sweden, is renowned for its good hospitality, top-tier service, and professional staff. After a website redesign, the brand turned to DEPT® to maintain its organic visibility.
Collaborating with Comwell’s web development agency, we laid the foundation for future growth, aligning with Comwell’s commitment to exceptional service.
Crafting an effective SEO migration strategy
Our primary goal was to preserve Comwell’s domain authority and rankings during the website transition. Our comprehensive SEO migration strategy focused on 3 pillars: authority preservation and transfer, technical performance optimisation, and critical page translation.
Authority preservation: We safeguarded valuable backlinks and utilised proper redirects to retain link equity and ensure minimal disruption to traffic, reducing 404s and referral authority.
Technical optimisation: Title tags, meta descriptions, and headers were optimised, and we implemented structured data markup for improved search engine understanding and appearance. This helped us ensure that all pages are crawlable for search engines.
Critical page translation: Essential pages were translated into English to cater to a broader English-speaking audience, improving user experience.
5 key phases for success
1. Discovery / Website audit and benchmarking: A thorough audit and benchmarking performance sets the stage, defining technical tasks and objectives.
2. Collaboration phase: Meticulous communication and coordination ensured task implementation and quality assurance.
3. Pre-migration audit: We checked the staging site for potential issues to generate a pre-migration checks report. Also, redirect mapping and testing prepared us for smooth and uninterrupted navigation.
4. Launch preparation: Google Search Console was set up to initiate a comprehensive fetch process to test if Google could fetch URLs on the website and how it renders a page. The rigorous testing of redirects helped us verify that all systems were functioning.
5. Post-migration audit: Following the migration, we conducted a thorough examination of website functionality, content integrity, and user experience.
Comprehensive post-migration performance measurement
To measure the post-migration performance, we conducted benchmarking, which included an assessment of Comwell’s KPIs. We looked at metrics related to website traffic, user engagement, and search engine rankings to ensure the migration didn’t negatively impact them.
Our collaboration resulted in a highly successful and smooth migration with no loss in organic visibility, traffic, or technical issues affecting Google’s indexing.
Comwell’s thriving online future
In steering Comwell through a seamless SEO migration, DEPT® not only preserved but augmented their existing SEO value. Our commitment to meticulous strategies, technical skills, and a collaborative ethos underscores this success.
Looking ahead, we focus on strengthening Comwell’s online presence. By creating dedicated landing pages and targeted content, we aim to elevate visibility for local keywords, cementing Comwell’s position as a digital frontrunner.
The migration’s success is measured in maintaining and thriving in organic searches, evidenced by an increase in non-branded search terms. Comwell’s authoritative standing remains intact, showcasing the effectiveness of our approach.
Through the SEO work with DEPT®, Comwell has kept its domain rating and organic traffic through a complex transition of both website and booking engine. DEPT® has been our go-to choice to help mitigate and survey the transition, which went better than planned. We are very happy with the results and our partnership with DEPT®
Stefan Bovien Nielsen, Digital Specialist, Web Integration & Strategist, Comwell
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