Case Studies > Website migration for Sportmadness
Website migration for Sportmadness
The Client
Sportmadness was born with the vision of becoming the world’s leading brand in sports services. They operate in Spain, UK, and Latin America, helping sport entrepreneurs to make a living from sport.
As a leading sports management company, Spormadness was in the beginning of an aggressive growth plan – fresh off numerous acquisitions with many more on the horizon – and was planning to consolidate their global presence using a single platform. They had 4 contry-specific domains; all treated separately by Google and were looking for a way to improve the visibility of all of their domains, but worried their current strategy thwarted longer-term organic visibility.
The Challenge
Realising that each brand’s domain was being seen as a separate entity by Google and forced to build its own individual SEO value, our team came to the client with an aggressive strategy; consolidate all their individual brands into one domain by merging each of their individual country-specific domains into a single global platform.
Our theory was that if we bring the 4 country-specific domains into one, we would able to consolidate historic SEO value, strengthen the global SEO authority and create one master domain, with brand specific directories. This particular strategy built the foundation for future long-term scalable growth.
Since each brand had a different target audience, both geographically and psychographically, our strategy was to create assets on each directory; unique to that specific target audience. These assets included blogs, highly specific and relevant service pages, campaign landing pages, and more; thus treating each directory as a separate business, nestled into one parent top-level domain. Most importantly, the various properties were co-relevant to each other, meaning we were able to make the sum of all country-specifi brands more relevant for a significantly wider subset of keywords.
The Solutions
We started the migration process by analysing the audience and website performance for every country, making sure we kept the same targets and buyer personas once the core website was containing each of the sub-brands. At the same time, we prepared all the technical changes that were going to make once the migration process started.
Once we gathered all the data and saved the relevant content for each domain, we created all the new sections in the core website that were going to be used as a recipient for the new directories. We also updated the internal linking structure to reflect the changes.
Finally, we executed the domain migration and generated the permanent redirections for the external domains, so the users tryingo to access the old website were automatically redirected to the global platform. Additionally, we informed Google of the change in the addresses through Google Search Console and submited the new sitemap reflecting the updated permalink structure.
The Results
The domain migration brought almost immediate growth, as within 1 month we were able to secure improvements in the quantity of organic traffic earned for the domain. Most of the organic traffic metrics saw a drastic increase, as per the data below:
- 438% increase in user sessions.
- 661% increase in page views.
- 53.7% increase in pages per session.
- 23.4% increase in average organic position (Google).
The core domain also started to increase the global presence in other countries now that Sportmadness was using a master top-level-domain property.
- The average organic traffic coming from Spain increased by 272.6%.
- The average organic traffic coming from Colombia increased by 1,200%.
- The average organic traffic coming from Mexico increased by 460.1%.
- The average organic traffic coming from the United States increased by 10,257.4%.
Project Details
Client
Sportmadness
Date
May, 2020
Category
SEO, Technical SEO
