Site migration SEO issues (+25.9% traffic recovered, +258% ROI)

Introduction

The client requested help with a site migration to a new custom platform. Where initial migration was done before this request, and after migration, ~26% of organic traffic was lost.

Story

In this sample, migrated sites had 27000 organic traffic (according to Google Analytics) per day.

On the graph above, we can see that during a site migration, we noticed a huge traffic drop, approx 26%

To achieve this task, we requested the following from the client:

• To recover the old website version on a custom subdomain, we could compare the old and new.
• Access the internal analytical database (Google BigQuery) with all URLs and statistics they have. It’s not a GA copy. It’s a complete database with content, statistics, etc., for each URL on the site.

Challenge

In its shortest term (working 24/7), we did research and analysis to find lost traffic during migration. As a result, we discovered approximately 550 pages bringing the traffic.
Why were those pages not identified at the beginning?
There are a few factors:

1. The client did initial work without our help; therefore relied on the data in their internal database only.
2. Their internal database had no information on those pages (they were custom out of old platform pages)
3. The client is trying to avoid all custom pages and doesn’t pay attention to them much, as it’s usually some custom scripts/services where the primary purpose of the website is a community

Solution

We added a few workflows to collect URLs from:

• Crawling old version of a website
• Google Analytics data
• Google Search Console data
• Internal analytical database (BigQuery)
• Backlinks

This way, we are getting as much of different URLs that exists or existed on an old website, as possible.

After URL list is collected, we analyze traffic for each page. Based on traffic amount, we set priorities to utilize the dev team efficiently and have the highest priority sections to be migrated on the migration date, where lower priority (less traffic) pages could be set to be migrated later on. 

Result

The site recovered to the pre-migration traffic level

ROI

As the site monetizes using ads, selling premium subscriptions, being affiliated with some shops and some additional on-site services, the approximate ARPU (average revenue per user) is $0.059

Organic traffic recovered: 210600/mo

Revenue recovery: $12425/mo

ROI: 258%

After deducting our hourly and developer costs, it led to approx ROI for the first month of 258%, and after the first month, no more work was needed, and the site got its revenue of $12425/monthly recovered.