How My Site and Blog Redesign Resulted in 350 Percent Increase in Traffic

Search Engine Marketing | Case Studies | Research and Analysis | Best Practices

dms-website My recent site redesign and blog optimization project has resulted in a 359 percent increase in traffic to my main site as well as ranking for 3,240 brand new keywords. Now that the project is complete, I wanted to share what I did, how I did it, a hiccup along the way, and the excellent results we’ve seen so far.

Alert readers may have noticed that in the past few months, I’ve redesigned my blog. That effort was part of a larger project to update both my primary website and my blog and combine the two within one domain.

First, a little background. I started my “Web Ink Now” blog in 2004. Very quickly I realized I hated the name, but I just kept blogging away on the webinknow.com domain for the next 15 years, something like 1,500 posts with 10,000 comments.

As I gained readers, my blog became increasingly important to me and my business. I’ve had posts viewed by over a million people and posts with hundreds of inbound links. Many posts have directly led to speaking engagements, business opportunities, and interview requests, so I had been very reluctant to fiddle with the blog for fear of disrupting anything.

It has also become something deeply personal.

Thank you to everyone who has read and commented over the years! My blog is extraordinarily important to me. It’s doubles as a personal journal that I refer to many times. Am I the only blogger who frequently uses a search engine to find stuff on their own blog?

Several years ago, I made the first change. I moved my site and my blog from two other services to HubSpot and as part of that move also did a redesign of the blog. Those moves proved to be a fine decision because I love the HubSpot blog and website interfaces because they give me much more flexibility and tools than my previous services.

Combining my site and my blog

At the start of 2018, I had a series of meetings with IMPACT, my website strategy, design, and SEO agency (HubSpot Partner of the Year in 2017). We discussed high level strategy for how I might improve my Search Engine Optimization (SEO) at the same time that we implement a much-needed site redesign of my primary davidmeermanscott.com domain.

My main site is where people end up who search on my name, or who read one of my books, or see me speak and want to learn more. It’s also the place where people go who want to hire me to speak.

A recommendation made by my team at IMPACT was to combine my site and my blog under the davidmeermanscott.com domain, eliminating the webinknow.com blog domain and build the graphical redesign around the combination.

This idea made total sense, but it was scary!

I was super worried about breaking something. Or losing content.

We ended up pushing forward with the plan and did the work in several phases. Along the way we only had one minor glitch. Somehow, the blog comments didn’t get turned on properly, so the blog was without comments on older posts or the ability for people to comment on new ones for a few weeks. Fortunately, that was fixed without the loss of any comment history.

For a deep analysis of the ins and outs of how IMPACT implemented this project, please check out the post The SEO Implications of Changing Domains During a Website Redesign on the IMPACT blog.

If you want to geek out on the details, you might enjoy listening to a Podcast with me, Stacy Willis, and Kathleen Booth from IMPACT How to Combine Two Successful Websites While Improving Traffic and Rankings. We dig in deep with the details of the project.

SEO results from redesign and migration project

One of the main issues with my Search Engine Optimization in the past is that my blog and my site were both reasonably successful but since they were about the same topics, I was competing against myself for search terms!

By combining my blog and site, we saw a massive spike in the SEO on the davidmeermanscott.com domain. We had expected positive results, but we were so happy when the data showed it worked better than we had hoped.

Here are a few graphs to show the results.