Content Migration Generates 134% Yearly Traffic Increase, Monthly Leads Record

See how combining content on our client's site resulted in a 134% increase in organic traffic and a record number of leads

overview

Google’s definition of what good content looks like is constantly evolving. What worked five years ago, a year ago, even 6 months ago, may not necessarily work now.

The latest change to Google’s algorithmic approach to evaluating content occurred with the release of the BERT update in October 2019, sending content producers scrambling to make sure their sites were up to snuff.

But ensuring your site’s content makes the grade doesn’t need to be stressful — or even that time-consuming.

It could be as elementary as combining what’s already there.

We’ve seen it work before.

The Brand

Based in Hermann, Mo., Fundraising Brick assists non-profit organizations — schools, universities, churches, municipalities, etc. — with the execution of fundraising campaigns by providing engraved bricks and tiles with custom messaging to create memorials, walkways, walls, and more.

Neither organizing nor executing a successful fundraiser is a small feat. As such, Fundraising Brick provides its customers with much more than just the engraved materials.

The organization provides resources dedicated to educating the customer on how to acquire and engage with donors, marketing services to help promote the fundraiser, and assistance to install all bricks or tiles.

The issue, though, was that the site did not effectively communicate everything Fundraising Brick had to offer.

Problem

Similar content spread across many website pages

Jump to problem >

Solution

Migrate similar content on to a single page

Jump to solution > >

Results

134% increase in organic traffic, record number of leads

Jump to results > >

The Problem

In early 2018, Fundraising Brick asked for our assistance.

The site, despite a high volume of content, was having serious trouble ranking on the first page of Google search results for even their brand and heavy hitting industry term – Fundraising Brick.

Results month over month were consistently poor in key areas that included:

Low visitor counts
Lackluster number of leads
Nearly zero sales from organic traffic

The most frustrating part for Fundraising Brick, however, was that these results were nowhere near a reflection of the effort the team had put in to write and publish exactly what was thought to be the content that Google had wanted.

Something was clearly off.

Loaded down with a ton of disjointed content and redundancies across different topics, the Fundraising Brick website began to sag under the pressure of its own weight. It was a matter of bloat, caused primarily by publishing similar content on multiple pages for the sake of keyword density, instead of centralizing a large quantity of related content across a small number of pages.

In this new, post-BERT world, Google wants to see contextual, conversational content that aids a visitor in the decision-making process by answering questions and providing solutions — not just presenting that visitor with a spattering of keywords.

We needed to eliminate this bloat — or at least reduce it through consolidation — so that the site could be ushered into a new era.

THE SOLUTION

The plan was a content migration.

We discussed with Fundraising Brick the idea of this migration and stressed the many benefits that could follow.

The migration plan consisted of the following steps:

Reorganize the website’s architecture by putting similar pages into categories
Transfer content from weaker pages of each category to stronger pages
Use 301 redirects to transfer any authority of weaker pages to stronger pages

The idea was not to completely scrap the content that had been written; we simply wanted to blend like content into a single page to create more of a logical, educational, and overall more valuable experience for the visitors of the site and, in the process, Google.

The image below illustrates how this was done.

fundraisingbrick-content-migration

Fundraising Brick goes the extra mile by installing every brick or tile it sells. The issue was, the company was using at least four pages of its site to educate customers on this one service.

When viewed individually, these pages informed visitors of Fundraising Brick’s installation design services, provided a guide to installation layout options, listed examples of previous installation projects, and even promoted brick/tile locator maps, which could be used to locate the bricks of specific donors.

These pages, all created to promote different aspects of the same service, needed to be combined.

When our content migration was complete, four pages had become one, and the byproduct felt like much more of a comprehensive guide to Fundraising Brick’s installation service package.

It made perfect sense.

If you’re interested in installation services, it’s likely you’ll also want to see examples of past installation. It’s just as likely that you’ll want to see options for different layouts.

And what about exciting add-ons like the locator map? Whether or not you were even aware that option existed, you would find that on the same page.

This type of top-to-bottom structure catered to all of the installation questions visitors could have while on the Fundraising Brick website.

The content, now all in one place, had been tailored with the customer journey in mind, and, as a result, satisfied Google’s new content demands.

Once each of the pages that had content removed was 301 redirected to its corresponding parent page to transfer on any existing authority, the migration was complete.

And it has paid off handsomely in terms of traffic and sales.

THE RESULT

Not unlike many of our clients, Fundraising Brick needed results at a minimal cost. We were able to meet those needs with a content migration that continues to produce impactful, sustainable results.

Here are the some of the results of the migration:

More than 100% increase in monthly traffic in less than 24 months
Record-high number of leads (160) during October 2019 – during a slow season
Number of keywords ranked in top three positions of Google increased by 14 times

Content improvements rarely produce immediate results, especially one on the scale of a sitewide migration, but the long-term payoff can be considerable.

The graph below was taken directly from Fundraising Brick’s Google Analytics account and illustrates the gradual increase in monthly site visits starting with when the migration was proposed in January of 2018:

In less than 24 months, monthly organic site traffic more than doubled, and the number of leads Fundraising Brick received over that time — and continues to receive — has exceeded all expectations.

In fact, as of this writing, since receiving an all-time high 160 leads in October 2019, Fundraising Brick set another record mark with 174 leads in January 2020.

THE CONCLUSION

If you, too, have struggled to achieve high organic search growth despite having produced a high volume of great content, a reorganization and migration of that content could help.

This process will cause very little disruption to the structure of your site, and it’s potentially a very cost-effective way of removing some of the same unintended bloat that was stunting Fundraising Brick’s organic search growth.

It may take some work, but that’s why our team is here. And for your website visitors, the reward is a much more enriching experience.

For you, the reward could be improved rankings in Google that produce more of those visitors and a wealth of new opportunities for growth.