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SaaS – Equity Management
Managing Site Migration
Planned and executed a full domain migration from the old domain name to the new one with no lasting organic traffic loss.
- Industry
- Finance
- Timeline
- 6 months to recover and surpass pre-migration traffic
- Objectives
- Protecting & growing organic traffic
- Strategy
- Pre- and post-migration planning
The Challenge
Migrating to a longer, less brand-recognizable domain risked losing direct traffic and confusing users, with no PR or brand-awareness campaign supporting the rebrand.
Engagement length: 6 months
The Results
- ✓Google started indexing pages on the new domain 4–6 weeks after the migration.
- ✓Organic traffic surpassed pre-migration levels within 5–6 months, despite some fluctuations along the way.
- ✓Organic traffic has continued to grow steadily since February 2026, even though search demand for the new brand name is still low (meaning the growth has been driven by non-branded keywords).
My Approach
1. Pre-migration
- ✓Planned schema markup updates: Updated automatically except for the customized ones
- ✓Planned sitemap updates: Updated automatically by the plugin
- ✓Planned canonical tag updates: Updated automatically by the plugin
- ✓Planned hreflang tag updates: Updated automatically by the plugin
- ✓Planned metadata updates: Updated to reflect the new brand name and added “(Formerly Global Shares)”
- ✓Updated navigational links to relative URLs: Minimized the number of redirect requests post-migration
- ✓Planned an early rebrand announcement: Allowed early entity discovery for both bots and users (see Kit and Wise)
- ✓Audited external websites pointing to us: Prepared a list of sites to reach out to, e.g. high-value referral domains
- ✓Planned PDF link updates: Updated internal links within eBooks, whitepapers, and infographics
- ✓Conducted redirect testing on the staging site: Ensured there were no broken redirects
- ✓Conducted a pre-migration site crawl: Compared crawl depth, number of crawled pages, word count, metadata…
- ✓Captured pre-migration metrics as a benchmark: e.g. number of crawl requests in GSC, CWV scores for both mobile & desktop, traffic including organic, engagement levels, conversions, and authority scores
- ✓Communicated with internal stakeholders: e.g. Campaign, SDRs, AEs, CRM
2. Migration
- ✓Implemented redirects using regex (no manual mapping needed): As the URL structure stayed consistent, simple wildcard rules redirected groups of URLs without mapping each one manually
- ✓Launched the rebrand website banner: “Global Shares is now JPMorgan Workplace Solutions” banner to inform users that they had landed in the right place, reducing bounces
- ✓Launched a rebrand news post: Linked from the banner so users could learn more about the rebrand
3. Post migration
- ✓Conducted a post-migration site crawl & manual checks:
- Spotted issues like 404s, crawling and indexing, hreflang, and redirects
- Compared with pre-migration crawl results
- Validated schema markup
- ✓Informed Google of the migration: Used GSC’s “Change of Address” tool
- ✓Updated the website URL on external sites: e.g. high-value backlink sources, GBPs, social media, partnership websites, review platforms, Wikipedia, app stores, online directories
- ✓Updated internal linking at scale: Ensured links pointed to their destinations directly instead of relying on redirects
- ✓Improved site performance for quicker crawling and indexing:
- Inlined above-the-fold CSS so it was served quicker
- Preloaded the font displayed above the fold
- Swapped to next-gen .avif and .webp images
- Followed recommendations from the CWV report
- ✓Monitored crawl requests and server access logs:
- Made sure bot crawl activity spiked on both the old and new domains, meaning search engines were aware of the migration
- Looked for 5XX errors and request timeouts, which cause bots to crawl the website less frequently
- ✓Cleaned up legacy redirects: Updated old redirect chains from A->B->C to A->C and B->C
- ✓Communicated with clients and prospects: e.g. in-app banners, newsletters, roundtables