Rainbow Waters: How the Migration Enhanced SEO Value and Skyrocketed the Results
When you’ve been working with SEO for years, you know how demanding it is to migrate to a new site and how carefully it must be handled to avoid losses. With every upgrade or redesign, there’s a significant risk of losing the SEO value you’ve built with effort and time.
As experienced SEO experts specialized in improving and expanding businesses’ organic presence, at Salty Digital we see this challenge as an outstanding opportunity to help the site reach even higher heights.
The issue, therefore, is to initially design a comprehensive and well-thought-out strategy that includes all the necessary steps so that the site can be transferred safely to a new environment without negatively affecting its ranking in organic results, and even increasing SEO value.
Or, as we say and apply at Salty Digital, the “four-phase strategy” that ensures the new site not only preserves, but actually improves, its organic presence.
That was exactly what happened in the migration to the new site for Rainbow Waters, the top provider of innovative and eco-friendly clean-water solutions for households and businesses. It was an undertaking with great challenges, but our structured methodology and organization led to seamless collaboration with the marketing department and developers to achieve an excellent result.
✅ Phase 1: Pre-Audit and Plan Creation
The first SEO audit (out of three in total!) is the foundation on which we build our work. With this initial comprehensive check, we identify all the problems and improvements needed, so we can craft our strategy. This plan helps us define priorities and responsibilities, while also providing clear guidance, very important when SEO experts, developers, marketing, and IT must collaborate toward a common goal.
In this phase, problems were gradually corrected, each fix was checked, and we were alongside each responsible party to guide and answer any questions that arose.
✅ Phase 2: Migration Consulting
Once all issues on the new site were resolved, we entered the second phase: how exactly the migration would occur. At the heart of the migration, we provided clear and precise instructions so everyone knew what to do, when, and why.
A key tool here was the SEO Migration Checklist we created and detailing step by step how all essential elements would be preserved and how the redirections to new URLs would be managed.
However, and this is the innovation in this migration, we didn’t follow a conservative and “routine” approach aimed merely at maintaining existing SEO value. Our goal was to generate value and growth, and we viewed the migration as the perfect opportunity to do so.
Thus, we implemented a holistic strategy to strengthen the pages and entire site as much as possible:
⭕ We proposed and created new, relevant, and useful content, including FAQs for key landing pages, based on market and user needs.
⭕ We proceeded with writing new targeted articles that improve user experience, attract the right audience, and help them make the right choice.
⭕ We ensured new helpful landing pages were built for users.
⭕ We modified and optimized the site structure.
Increase in organic visibility on the first page
✅ Phase 3: Pre-launch Audit
The critical moment was approaching, and whether everything had been done correctly would be confirmed by the second SEO audit before launch, ensuring everything aligned with our set standards.
The key here was not to do a final formal check “to tick the box”, but to look at the entire site again, since various changes had been made in the meantime, so it was expected that many technical improvements would be found.
From improving URLs and structured data to creating interlinking and faced navigation, the goal was to not waste any crawl budget, avoid low content or thin-value pages, and build a structure that properly presents the necessary high-value pages to Google, correctly structured both technically and content-wise.
100% increase in commercial and transactional keywords
✅ Phase 4: After launch
The big day arrived and the site went live! We were alert from the start to ensure everything functioned correctly and no lead or sale was lost through the website.
Simultaneously, we monitored the site’s performance and all details daily to ensure everything was going well.
It was also the right moment to conduct the final SEO audit, checking all elements from the start, comprehensively. Now the site was on the live server, so we scrutinized aspects that couldn’t be checked on staging, such as pagespeed, sitemaps.xml, HTML headers, etc.
Finally, we had to confirm there were no dead internal links or staging links in the code, and that both desktop and mobile functionality were flawless.
No.1 in Organic Traffic compared to competitors
✅ The Results of Our Strategy
The results of this meticulous methodology fully vindicated us!
Already from the launch and almost two months afterward, it became evident that the migration was impeccably coordinated and highly successful, achieving improved Google rankings.
Here’s exactly what we achieved:
⭕ Placement improvements and/or appearance on Google’s first page for 865 keywords
⭕ ~15% increase in organic traffic
⭕ ~10% increase in organic impressions
⭕ No. 1 in Organic traffic compared to competition
⭕ 100% increase in commercial and transactional keywords
When most migrations result in significant losses in “SEO equity” or merely manage to keep the site afloat, we couldn’t help but feel proud of this demanding migration’s outcome.
And of course, we owe big thanks to all the professionals with whom we collaborated flawlessly, together, achieving this great success!
