Case Study
A 30-year financial publishing archive moved off a legacy CMS — with a +61% lift in organic clicks on the other side, and zero high-value URLs lost.
The Approach
From audit to cutover
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Weeks 1–3 · Inventory
URL inventory and traffic weighting
Crawled and classified all 900k URLs, weighted by organic traffic and revenue contribution to identify the 8% of pages driving 92% of value.
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Weeks 3–6 · IA Rebuild
Information architecture redesign
Collapsed redundant tag pages, consolidated thin authors and topics, and rebuilt taxonomy around buyer-journey research instead of the legacy CMS's data model.
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Weeks 6–10 · Staging
Tested redirects against a live crawler
Built a tested redirect strategy in staging, ran it against a live crawler, and signed off the redirect map with engineering before any cutover code was merged.
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Weeks 10–12 · Cutover
Two-week sprint cadence post-launch
Fortnightly forecast reviews. Anything that slipped against the migration baseline was re-scoped within the next sprint, not at quarter-end.
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900K
Migrated
pages, zero lost
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61%
Clicks
vs. baseline, 90 days
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39%
Impressions
across tracked keywords
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513%
Top-1 Keywords
YoY against same window
Working with a client that is so responsive and organised made the work a pleasure. A big part of the project was our ability to implement — having a partner like Type A meant we could move much faster than the original forecast.
In Detail
How we ran the engagement
Phase
Investment News serves wealth managers and financial advisors with a 30-year archive across three regional editions. The publication's commercial model is heavily dependent on organic traffic to advertiser-funded editorial — any drop-off would be felt within the quarter.
The site needed to migrate to a modern editorial platform without losing the organic equity that two decades of editorial work had built. The brief was zero traffic loss. The internal team had been burned by a previous migration attempt.
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