SEO and site migration for Arena Plaza shopping mall
Arena Plaza is Central Europe’s largest shopping mall, offering retail, entertainment and arts for its customers in Budapest. The Plaza uses its website – Arenaplaza.hu actively to promote all its activities. Brandlift was tasked with search engine optimization and migration for the Plaza’s website.
Insight
Website migration projects are risky, as the majority of organic search related traffic may get lost if the modifications on the given website are significant. (Migration means the reestablishment of an existing website on a new CMS platform or the change of the existing structure of the website.) Arenaplaza.hu contents were placed on a new CMS, while the site’s architecture, URL frame and design also changed significantly - therefore, SEO was a great concern. On average, website migration projects result in a 10-20% organic traffic loss in the short-term, because even if everything goes according to plan, some URL authority reduction is unavoidable.
Action
Brandlift started out the project with the detailed analysis and brainstorming of relevant keywords that could help the site most. This was followed by developing the meta-generation rules, which greatly influence how a keyword search appears on a search engine result page, impacting click-through rates. Before officially launching the new website, Brandlift conducted a series of tests to find and correct indexing errors. This was followed by the most risky step: migration of the website.
Results
Brandlift developed a detailed 301 redirect system to minimize organic traffic loss. We recreated the XML sitemap of the site and thus helped Google to reindex the new website. Once launched, we kept monitoring the results and identified small migration bugs, which helped us halt a large-scale traffic loss. The well-planned migration and the onsite SEO development recommendations resulted in a continuous traffic growth, after the first month of single-digit-percentage traffic loss (no additional SEO activity took place). Organic traffic resulting from hits coming from non-brand-related keyword searches rose by 20% month-on-month for four months after the launch of the new website, compared to previous four months.