Acquiring A Website & Don't Know Where to Start with SEO?

The acquisition of a new company and the associated website can be an opportunity for the business moving forward. However, several steps need to be taken before you are going to be able to make any type of actionable decisions about what/the type of site changes to the website that need to be taken to get the most bang for your buck.

Please keep in mind that these recommendations are general in nature, and will be required to help give you the information that you will need to make the proper decisions moving forward about the integration of the website into the current property.

Key Action Items to Complete Before Determining Strategy

1. Get access to the new property’s Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, and any other identifiable analytics packages.
2. Conduct keyword website ranking analysis to determine what keywords the acquired website is ranking well for
3. Conduct a complete inbound link analysis
4. Complete a full website crawl to identify all pages that are contained within the site, and those that are indexed by the search engines.

Once you have this information, you will be armed with what you need to analyze the data and start to determine the following items that could set the acquiring company up to be successful on an ongoing basis.

In light of full disclosure, there are a bunch of moving parts contained with determining the strategy, so keep in mind that this isn’t a swift process in order to be properly done.

3 High-Level Research Items to Complete Before Deciding How to Migrate Acquired Website

Keyword Visibility & Performance

o What keywords is the acquired company’s website ranking well for?
o Are they going to be applicable to the business on an ongoing basis?
o If existing keyword traffic is applicable, a few strategies moving forward to retain this traffic could be:
• Create new pages and top-level landing pages/sections on the existing website to help capture some of this traffic, and                      optimize accordingly
• Integrate blog content and other assets into the current website, with the proper redirects in place

Content Marketing Assets & Performance

o Dig into the acquired website’s analytics to evaluate the type of content that has been written and how well has it performed, both from a traffic and conversion perspective.
o For high performing assets, consider keeping them as is and place a new spot for them on the existing website, provided that they meet the business’ KPI’s moving forward
o Are there any assets such as videos, imagery, lead magnets, or other assets that could be used to enhance sections or pages of the existing website?
o Where can you most effectively place a section on the new website that reflects the newly acquired company, while providing the most value and not interfering with the current experience?
o Should a landing page be created as a jumping off point for all redirected traffic coming from the old website? This can help provide a nice “handshake” so the visitor doesn’t think that they came to the wrong place, and bounce away from the website.

Inbound Link Profile & Redirections

o Conduct an inbound link analysis on the website that is being acquired.
o Strategize about different areas of the website that match up well with the topics, and consider redirections directly to those pages (if the content itself isn’t carried over in its entirety)
o Make sure that you globally redirect all additional links to the homepage to make sure that you get the most benefit on an ongoing basis
o Make sure that any bad links are identified and either removed or disavowed. It would be terrible to have a large number of these links, resulting in a penalty for the existing website.

As mentioned, there are a lot of moving parts and all of these are general best practices. I would be happy to take a deeper dive into all of this and come up with the proper plan that would provide the most benefit for the brand both now, and moving forward into the future. Contact us here to get started today.