CASE STUDY · WEBSITE MIGRATION
Keeping 80% of Traffic Through a Rebrand and Domain Change
A leading Indian general insurer kept 80% of its monthly traffic one month after moving to a new domain following a rebrand, with around 6k more URLs indexed than before. The work was a category-by-category redirect, canonical and sitemap plan, tested on staging before launch.
- Client
- A leading general insurer in India (rebrand and domain change)
- Industry
- Insurance (general)
- Market
- India
- Project
- Website migration
- Period
- First month after migration
- My role
- Led the SEO strategy; delivered with my team at the time
OUTCOMES
The results
Direct commercial and organic search impact delivered during the engagement.
80%
Of monthly organic traffic retained in the first month after the domain change.
6k
More URLs indexed on the new domain, helped by the rebuilt sitemap.
80%
Of domain authority regained within the first month.
BACKGROUND
The challenge
I led this engagement in a previous agency leadership role. After a rebrand, the insurer had to move its entire website to a new domain and update brand mentions across the site — while losing as little organic traffic as possible.
A domain change resets many of the signals search engines use, so every old URL, internal link, canonical and sitemap entry had to point cleanly to its new equivalent from day one.
Client and agency not named for confidentiality. I led the strategy; the work was delivered with my team at the time.
EXECUTION
What we did
Category-by-category audit
Audited the site section by section to plan redirects, internal links and canonical tags for every category before anything moved.
Full redirect map
Redirected all old-domain URLs to their equivalents on the new domain.
Canonicals and internal links
Repointed canonical tags and internal links so every URL referenced the new domain rather than relying on redirects.
Rebuilt XML sitemap
Recommended a new XML sitemap that included URLs missing from the old one, to help search engines crawl the new domain fully.
Pre-launch QA
Tested the UAT and development versions of the new-domain site, finding and fixing anomalies before the migration went live.
STRATEGIC LESSON
The takeaway
A domain change will usually cost some traffic at first; the job is to make every signal point to the new domain on day one so the dip is small and short.
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93%
Of organic traffic recovered within two weeks of the migration.
Core Web Vitals score
Recovering 93% of Traffic Two Weeks After a Redesign
+112%
Traffic in the second month after the move.
Traffic growth after the move
Moving a Blog to a Knowledge Centre and Growing Traffic 112%
+15%
Increase in organic traffic on the migrated website.
Growing Traffic 15% and Leads 6% After a Website Migration
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