David Meerman Scott | Author, entrepreneur and keynote speaker
The thought of combining two very successful websites into one would make most marketers quake in their boots. How did David Meerman Scott do it without interruption to his business AND see improvements in traffic and search engine rankings?
This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, I'm joined by famed marketing expert, best-selling author, entrepreneur and internationally-renowned keynote speaker David Meerman Scott, along with IMPACT's own principal strategist Stacy Willis.
The two recently worked together on a project to merge two of David's websites into one. Both sites attracted a significant volume of traffic and were important drivers of business for David - something that made the notion of combining them very scary.
In our conversation, David and Stacy talk about why they combined the sites, how they did it, and the results they saw.
Some highlights from my conversation with David and Stacy include:
David's primary website is DavidMeermanScott.com. He had several other sites including webinknow, which had over 1,500 blog posts and a considerable number of valuable backlinks.
When David and Stacy worked together to design his main website, they made the decision to merge all of the content from webinknow into the main site.
One of the main reasons they decided to combine the two sites was they were cannibalizing each other when it came to keyword rankings and traffic.
Stacy used tools like Screaming Frog and SEMRush to analyze how David's sites ranked and for which keywords, and that is how she was able to determine that these two particular sites should be merged (while some of David's other sites should not be folded into the main site).
Having a plan for putting 301 redirects in place for all of the pages that were going to be merged was essential to the success of the project.
Stacy also evaluated David's website traffic to determine which blogs were getting the most traffic and used this as an opportunity to improve the way they were optimized.
Central to this process was the development of a topic cluster strategy for David's news site.
Within weeks of launching the new site, Stacy was able to determine that all of David's traffic and keyword rankings from the two separate sites were preserved with the move to the new site.
In the weeks that followed, they also saw that many of his keyword rankings actually improved further, and he has begun to see an increase in lead flow to the site.
David's advice to anyone considering combining multiple websites is to take the project in stages.
Resources from this episode:
Stacy's article on The SEO Implications of Changing Domains During a Website Redesign (& a Successful Example)
"Is SEO Dead in 2019?" (pillar content collaboration between Liz Murphy and Franco Valentino)
Listen to the podcast to get details of the exact process David and Stacy went through to merge David's two websites and increase his search engine rankings.
