Website Migration: Doubling organic traffic to 100K+ per month*

*OBS: traffic estimations based on keyword performance uplift and measured using SEMrush.

Insplanet is part of Zmarta Group, which is a collection of websites that allow consumers to compare prices and offers across a variety of financial services. This includes loans, mortgages, electricity and insurance.

Insplanet was launched in 1999 and offers its customers a wide-range of insurance products. Over time this website accrued huge SEO value, but lost significant brand awareness.

Our brief was to successfully migrate the entire Insplanet.com domain into the Zmarta.se ecosystem without losing any SEO value.

The Results

0 %

Increase in overall
search visibility

Additional keywords
into the top 10 of Google

0 K

Extra clicks P/M, bringing total monthly organic traffic to 100K+

0 M

Additional organic impressions YoY (December + January)

The Collaboration

With all migrations, you need to create a formidable team. This was 100% the case with Insplanet, for this project we collaborated with the Zmarta internal SEO team along with group level and Insplanet development teams.

With this team in place, there was no questions left unanswered. A detailed project plan with clear responsibilities and deadlines was created, which allowed us to all know our integral part(s) in the project.

We all sync’d monthly at the beginning of the project, weekly in the month leading up to launch and daily in the final week.

Throughout this project Nucleus worked closely with the internal SEO resource at Zmarta, who had this to say 👇

Working with Nucleus on this project was a dream come true - we realised an immediate overlap in competencies, as well as brought our own individual experience with prior website migrations to this project. Nucleus and in-house SEO efforts were both included early on & throughout the entire migration process, which was a huge contribution to the success of this project.

The Challenges

Insplanet presented a few challenges due to the deep history of the website. To overcome these challenges, we hit them head on at the beginning of the project.

Redirects – History presented a larger scale of effort required due to the amount of URLs and website iterations over time.
Content – The content residing on Insplanet drove significant traffic on a monthly basis. Deciding to migrate, merge or delete content where necessary was key.

The Strategy

Once we understood Insplanet’s historical set up, existing performance and current challenges, we were able to put together an initial strategy that focused on three key phases:

Phase 1: Redirect Mapping
Phase 2: Content Analysis
Phase 3: Reporting

Phase 1: Redirect Mapping

Redirect mapping is the #1 component when migrating any website. This was no exception.

Early on, we made the bold decision to redirect all of insplanet.com into a mixture of sub-folders. Commercial pages were migrated to their respective site section in Zmarta.se.

Since launching in 1999, there have been tremendous SEO efforts undertaken to transform the performance of Insplanet into a market leader of insurance in Sweden. We did not want to lose any of that value.

We also understood that the website had gone through many iterations on its journey. Due to this, we knew that collating all historic and existing URLs was key.

From this point we were able to dissect historical redirects into 1:1 redirects between the original URL location to the new location on Zmarta.se – we believe this act of chopping up redirect chains was key driver to a successful migration.

Due to development being heavily involved in the migration effort, we were able to stress test the redirect logic and fix any anomalies in the development environment, of which there were plenty. Managing pre-existing trailing slash and nordic character (åöä) rules was a tricky obstacle.

However, we managed to tackle all of these obstacles pre-migration launch, so post launch was just double checking everything worked as expected and submitted a change of address via Google Search Console on the day.

Overall doing it this way made the go-live day much less stressful for everyone involved and we can now begin to see fantastic results from migrating relevant pages from Insplanet into the different sub-folders on Zmarta.

Phase 2: Content Analysis

Once we were happy with how the first phase was progressing, we moved onto finding additional growth opportunities though the existing content, we split this out into four steps.

Content Inventory – We gathered all content that existed on Insplanet to understand the performance against competing content on the Zmarta domain to understand competing pages.
Content Comparison – Performance metrics such as number of keywords, average of the keyword set, engagement signals such as average time on site and bounce rate, traffic and conversions allowed us to make a clear cut decision on which content was best to keep.
Content Relocation – Based on step 2 we were then able to make the decision on which Insplanet content was to directly replace Zmarta content. Alongside that, we were also able to make the decisions of which articles that existed on Insplanet but did not on Zmarta, would also make the move. Then lastly, content that added zero benefit we removed entirely.
Content Optimization – If we saw potential in content based on step 2, we then made the decision to move that content and add it immediately to our content calendar / roadmap. Then we knew this content would be optimized in the coming sprints and had a strong chance of adding value in the near future.