Maintaining Visibility + Traffic During a Website Migration Using the SEO Quadrant™

challenge

Since 2020, we have supported UCLA Health with strategy and execution across various channels, including digital advertising, SEO, and marketing automation. In 2021, the UCLA Health team was preparing to launch a new website to deliver an exceptional user experience and convert visitors to patients.

Without a strong SEO foundation, a migration like this can easily trigger a decline in search visibility and organic traffic. We took a foundational SEO approach encompassing multiple websites and stakeholders to maintain performance during this vulnerable time. We collaborated to ensure a seamless website launch that didn’t negatively impact traffic.

solutions

The SEO Quadrant™ is how we approach foundational organic search support. For UCLA Health, we started with a quick wins review, conducted a technical assessment, and provide ongoing content and keyword support. 

Using elements of the SEO Quadrant™, we were able to mitigate the potential risks of the website migration and unify efforts across the various teams and stakeholders involved. The SEO Quadrant includes four focus areas (quick wins review, technical SEO assessment, content and keyword audit, and competitor analysis) that help prioritize opportunities — identifying how to generate outcomes quickly and what’s needed for long-term success. Not being a one-size-fits-all approach, we first determined which areas would best help us achieve our goals.

We began with a quick wins review of the site to get a clear picture of what was working, where there was an opportunity for improvement, and what was critical to fix or eliminate. For example, we found that the site’s medical services pages lacked visibility due to the site hierarchy. As a result, we placed added focus on these pages during our technical assessment and keyword research.

Based on our insights from the quick wins review, we knew where to focus our technical support, which began with a technical SEO assessment. Our goal was to ensure the foundational SEO work done on the old site was successfully transferred to the new site. This is where we spent most of our time, which shows in the results. We didn’t just maintain search visibility — it improved.

With our technical support ongoing, we also conducted a content and keyword audit. One key finding was that the site’s high-priority pages (e.g., medical services) were competing with other department pages for authority and visibility. By auditing where the priority pages were ranking, we were able to make on-page content updates to help search engines better serve this content to our audience.

outcomes

While a 10%–20% short-term loss of site traffic is typical following a site migration, UCLA Health gained traffic and improved engagement because of its strong SEO foundation.

Within six months of the site launch, our collective efforts resulted in improvements in our key metrics:

• Visibility: +50% search impressions
• Traffic: +26% sessions

We also saw improvements in our secondary metrics, including:

• 42% increase in pages visited per session
• 20% improvement in time on site
• 21% improvement in page bounce rate
• 30% improvement in page load speed