That might sound like an odd question, especially coming from The Marketing Optimist. However, it’s something that bears examination. One of our telecoms marketing clients, Leeds based Simetric Telecom, was recently acquired by Texas based Tango Networks.
As part of the acquisition Tango Networks wanted a way to gently make Simetric’s customers and prospects aware of the change in ownership.
Once the deal was announced we did a lot of work with Simetric’s team in the UK and the Tango Networks team in the USA to get the story of the sale out to the telecoms market. We did this with Trade Press, social media, email, blogging and website content.
How to move a website
Once the messaging had gone out and the dust began to settle, attention turned to how to move the Simetric website traffic across to Tango Networks website. Over the years the Simetric site had gained some valuable search engine positions and drove leads to the site, generating business, so any move needed to be carefully handled.
The ideal outcome would be for the Simetric ranking positions to transfer over to Tango Networks.
Working with both teams we came up with an initial soft-redirect solutions which would show visitors to the Simetric site a message saying that they had been acquired by Tango Networks and then redirect them to specific landing pages on the Tango Networks site. For technical reasons we didn’t go for a redirect of the domain to the new site.
The upshot of this was that we added new content and code to handle the delayed redirects, which worked really well from a technical and customer point of view.
What happened to the Search Engine Rankings?
As hoped, the redirects improved the search engine optimisation of the Tango Networks site. An added bonus was that updating 95% of the Simetric site with this additional content, gave the rankings for the Simetric site an 8% boost too over several weeks.
While this was unintended, it’s really helping Tango Networks as once someone clicks on the Simetric result, they move to the Tango Networks site. So, everyone’s a winner!
What’s the real lessons here?
Regardless of the acquisition and all the redirects, the real takeaway for your business’ website is that adding new content to your site helps with rankings. While I’m sure you’re blogging regularly, you’re probably not updating your product, service, about us, contact us pages.
Going through the process of adding the content and redirects to 95% of Simetric’s pages meant that we effectively updated the whole site, which alerted Google to recrawl and improve the search rankings.
So, the lesson is that you should regularly review your whole site and update and change where needed, not just update your blog.
