Using SEO in Your M&A Marketing Plan

So, you’re planning on marketing during a merger and acquisition. Buckle up.

In all seriousness, SEO is an essential part of M&A marketing and should be at the forefront of your strategy. Here are the basics of how to use SEO in your merger and acquisition marketing plan.

Why Focus on SEO in Merger and Acquisition Marketing

It’s hardly a secret that the typical M&A has a lot of moving parts, especially from a marketing perspective. However, because there are so many different facets to keep track of, it’s easy for SEO to fall by the wayside in the process.

In turn, you could end up losing all the rankings you’ve spent years working to achieve. You could also lose your online brand visibility, and by extension fewer leads coming through your website.

How to Merge Two Websites Without Losing SEO: 7 Steps to SEO in an M&A

1. Conduct an SEO Audit for All Sites

We do mean all of them—even that vanity domain your CEO purchased back when the company was still in its infancy. Here are the steps you should take during your SEO audit at a glance:

• Conduct a site crawl: This imitates how Google will attempt to read and index your pages. Using tools like the SEO Spider from Screaming Frog can help you do this and find any potential errors on the existing sites.

• Review your sitemap: By reviewing your sitemap, you can identify potential duplicate content and find abnormalities like broken links, 500-level errors, and more.

• Check for mobile optimization: Tools like Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test can help you ensure your site follows best practices for mobile-first optimization.

• Check for indexing problems: Google can’t rank what it doesn’t know exists. Google Search Console can help you see which pages are being indexed and which are not. However, it’s important to note that not every page needs to be indexed—for example, the pages you gate behind forms for lead capture.

A common example of using SEO audits comes with healthcare acquisitions and mergers. Health systems acquire smaller brands relatively often, so it’s essential for these systems to work with the experts to conduct an SEO audit across any of their brands’ websites.

Conducting an SEO audit allows our team to understand the overall health of the websites (no pun intended). That way, we could make meaningful recommendations for how to preserve and enhance your brand’s SEO rankings effectively.

2. Audit Your Website Content

Again, you’ll want to audit every single piece of content on all the websites you’ll be merging. This can help you determine what is and isn’t ranking, what you can redirect, what you could delete, and pages that could potentially be merged.

Revisiting another example from the healthcare industry, your website and the site it’s merging with might both have pages about your primary care services. Keeping both of them might result in duplicates—and penalties from Google if you leave them as is. However, auditing allows you to determine if there is any content from either page that’s worth keeping, and how best to merge it.

3. Develop a New Sitemap

You might not have to start completely from scratch, especially if you’re merging with an existing brand. However, you may end up having to add dozens of new pages to your sitemap.

This is where the results of your audits come into play. Using the information you gleaned from the SEO and content audits, you can determine whether you need to add new pages to your website. This also allows you to determine how to combine them within your site structure so they all fit together seamlessly like one of those Russian nesting dolls.

Determine where you can combine content, and where you can potentially set up URL redirects with the same information.

4. Design the New Site with UX in Mind

User experience (UX) is something that you need to both preserve and improve during the migration process. Design your new, post-merger site so it can load quickly and is easy to navigate.

Google responds to how much time users spend on websites and the actions they take with them. By prioritizing UX as a key aspect of your design, it’ll be easier for your post-website migration SEO results to fall into place.

5. Map All URLs

Once you’ve set up the framework of your merged and migrated site with your sitemap, you’ll need to start matching which URLs on your old site can be redirected to pages on the new site.

Some of the URLs you map will have a direct, one-to-one translation. For example, if the brand you’re acquiring has a location-based page for the state of Nebraska and the site it’s merging to also has a page for that state, you can simply plan to have the old URL redirect to its new counterpart.

However, some pages won’t be as valuable to have on your old site. Your SEO audit may have determined that they don’t get much traffic, or it could be a very outdated page that no longer reflects your services. If that’s the case, you could redirect it to a more generalized page like the homepage or another page that’s relevant.

The goal of doing this is to avoid the dreaded 404 error. By matching up pages for your old site to redirect to after migration, you’ll have fewer dead-end pages to confuse Google.

6. Move the Old Site

Moving your old site onto your new site typically involves setting up lots of 301 redirects and updating your robots.txt files. It also entails telling Google you’re updating your website address with its Change of Address tool.

You’ll want to have all hands on deck for this, especially if your old website was particularly large. Some web hosting services allow you to migrate everything at once with an update of your DNS records, but this isn’t always the case.

7. Watch Your Indexed Pages

One of the most essential parts of any acquisition SEO strategy is to monitor your site’s standings with search engines—both before and after the sites have been merged. If you notice your indexed pages are trending upward in the weeks and months following your merger—great! That means you’ve likely set yourself up for success and are starting to reap the rewards.

However, if you start noticing your pages losing their rankings, you may need to make some adjustments or ensure your URLs are mapped correctly to help your site start climbing in the right direction again.

Easily share these steps with your team, and always have them on hand, by downloading them here.

 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Will Merging Websites Hurt SEO?

Yes and no. While most sites might lose keywords or backlinks temporarily, it can make your SEO stronger in the scope of your long-term strategy. Even more, pairing with an SEO company that knows how to handle website migrations and mergers can help you minimize any damage and strengthen your website’s search engine presence even more.

How Can I Save SEO Rankings When Migrating a Website?

There are a few steps you can take to preserve your website’s SEO during migration:

• First and foremost: Keep a backup of your old website
• Keep the same content and metadata on your current site
• Fix any links that were broken before migration
• Remove duplicate content so there’s only one version from either site
• Keep your XML sitemap up to date

Should I Complete My M&A Site Migration on a Sunday?

Absolutely not. While there are a few—very rare—exceptions, most website migrations will require a few small adjustments to make sure the migration for your M&A finished successfully.

When you notice that those pieces are missing, broken, or otherwise needing adjustment, you’ll want your migration team standing by to take care of them immediately. If you finish the migration on a Sunday, they’ll probably not be around to do it—meaning your website will be broken for the world to see for at least a few hours in the meantime.