0 to 10k Keywords in 9 Months: Coupon Site Migration Case Study

Disclaimer: As a white label SEO agency, we keep the names of the websites we work on confidential to respect our partners.

1. It was clear that the site required a complete SEO overhaul as everything the client had tried before joining SUSO was ineffective. We therefore set our sites on executing a full site migration to a new domain.
2. The site migration required the creation of dozens of power pages that would help grow keyword visibility and build topical relevance.
3. The backlink profile required thorough auditing to identify potential link spam as well as a link building strategy to build the new site’s authority.

Site Migration

Following significant algorithmic devaluation before starting their campaign with SUSO and after rigorous analysis by our team of SEOs, we made the informed decision to migrate the client’s website to a new domain. 

A site migration can seem daunting as there’s no guarantee of success, but with careful planning and execution, you can give your domain the best chance of climbing the SERPs. Our strategy was split into three main stages:

1. Preparation – we prepared an SEO specification by benchmarking the current site’s hosting and server to the new domain. We also created a map of all URLs that needed migrating along with notes on keywords and ranking targets before running a technical and backlink analysis on the site so that the new domain would be as healthy as possible post migration. We also created a redirect map to ensure a smooth transition between the old and new URLs.
2. Migration – We migrated all of the content from the old domain to the new site and made sure that redirects were put in place so as to pass the page authority of the old URLs to the new ones. We also ensured all internal links throughout the site were also correctly implemented and that there were no crawling issues with the core landing pages. 
3. Post Migration – We monitored the progress of the migration with particular focus on the following factors:

• Crawlability and indexability – were the pages being crawled and indexed?
• Mobile-friendliness – was the new website mobile friendly?
• Page performance and core web vitals – were the pages loading quickly?
• Keyword rankings – has Google started to rank the site for important queries?

You can find out more about how to carry out a successful site migration with our checklist here.

Content Strategy Driven by Power Pages

Whilst the majority of the content on the old website was migrated onto the new site (with additional optimisations), the basis of the content strategy for the new website was to create and publish long-form content in the form of power pages.

Power pages are cornerstone pieces of content that provide in-depth information about a single topic. 

The aim of a power page is to:

• Establish your site as the authority voice within a topic
• Increase your keyword visibility for informational search queries
• Offer an opportunity to create a linkable asset that users can share as the go to source of information
• Provide an opportunity to add internal links to and from other important pages on your website

During the planning stages of the content creation process we identified topics and keywords that would be relevant to the client’s site. This was followed by competitor analysis which involved putting together outlines of what kind of content needed to be added to the pages as well as identifying their search intent by looking at the top ranking pages for the target keywords.

This process, in combination with the migration of the client’s pre-existing content onto the new domain resulted in the following keyword visibility growth (see results below).

Backlink Audit & Link Building Strategy

As mentioned earlier, before carrying out the migration, we analysed the old domain’s backlink profile with the aim of identifying any potentially harmful backlinks that may impact the new site’s rankability. 

Some of the factors that we look for are backlinks from websites that:

• Are linking to the client’s site with questionable (i.e. expletives, adult anchors) or completely irrelevant anchor texts
• Are linking to the client’s site an unnatural amount of times (i.e. hundreds or thousands of times)
• Are linking to client’s site with comment or forum spam
• Are linking to the client’s site and are generally of poor quality i.e. they have no topical relevance, may not have any traffic or rank for any keywords, look poor or unnatural.

Once we identified the potentially harmful backlinks, we added them to the client’s new disavow file and submitted this file to all properties of the site’s Google Search Console. 

Although the PageRank of the old URLs was passed onto the new domain’s pages as a result of the 301 redirects that we implemented, we also needed to continue to build domain authority for the new website with a fresh link building strategy. This involved building backlinks from topically relevant websites to the priority pages of the website i.e. the homepage and discount code pages.

Since the migration and the execution of our link building strategy, the client’s link profile has seen consistent growth with a steady stream of new backlinks over the past year or so.

In less than a year, the new domain is ranking for 9,698 keywords within the top 100 positions of Google.com

The site is also now ranking for over 100 keywords within the top 10 positions in the same time frame.