Mergers and acquisitions: How can SEO help?
During the merger and acquisition process (M&A), SEO can be a huge help, especially in enterprise SEO practices. Things like website migration, pinpointing future opportunities, implementing best practices, and helping identify any risks can all be achieved with SEO. Making the most of what it has to offer can maintain or even improve search visibility.
To keep your site at its most optimal, exercising optimisation techniques from the get-go of an M&A process makes sure the process is successful and helps put preventive measures in place if needed. This is especially useful for enterprise sites that could carry a lot more risks due to their size. A site of such size has to be handled with care and consideration.
SEO and target acquisitions
By looking at organic search traffic, companies can identify the most valuable acquisitions for their business. You can analyse competitor traffic to see who your top competition is and what keywords they’re ranking for. This can then help a future content strategy. For example, if you’re planning to write content that ranks for specific keywords or topics but the site is already ranking for these terms, then you know that it’s a good target acquisition.
All in all, SEO is great for identifying target acquisitions by analysing if they would be useful to your current site. It forecasts any potential risks and can evaluate its performance by collecting valuable data. Deciding who you want to merge with or target can be made easier by also identifying previous issues the site may have encountered that will negatively affect future performance.
SEO practices during an M&A
There are some important practices that SEO can handle during M&A to keep everything running smoothly. It encounters many challenges when deciding to merge and take on a newly acquired site, and these mainly revolve around trying to maintain site performance. Let’s have a look at a few of these practices:
Website migration
Using the correct SEO implementations, you can ensure a smooth website migration that uses the correct 301 redirects and protects your performance. To help, you can read our ‘Dummies Guide To: Website Migration’! This is sure to help you out on your migration journey, explaining all the best practices.
Audits
When merging sites, an audit tells you what the performance is like- you could perform a content audit or search performance audit. Things like a content audit tell you how well each piece of content is doing, letting you know whether it will fit into your strategy or not. From here, you can decide whether to completely get rid of certain content or merge it. A content audit could come after the acquisition and help you align both sets of content from the two sites and form a cohesive content strategy.
Click here to read our SEO audit step-by-step guide.
A search performance audit analyses the performance of keywords, backlinks and all the elements of technical SEO. With this information, you can compare each site’s SEO and pick the elements that best complement each other. You can make sure each website’s strengths are best utilised.
Updating backlinks
For most domain authority possible, updating backlinks means looking at which are the most valuable when merging. By analysing the profile of backlinks, you can determine which are most beneficial to the ranking position of your updated site.
Monitoring traffic
This tends to happen post-acquisition, spotting any dips or increases in traffic. By carefully monitoring the amount of traffic since merging sites, you can tell whether the process has been a success or whether any changes need to be made. You need to check that search visibility is still high and implement the right solutions if any dips in traffic have been identified.
Combining SEO with PPC
Senior Client Services Manager, Sam Evans, explains:
To ensure best marketing practices, it’s important to combine SEO with PPC efforts– both go hand in hand to create a successful M&A process. As the process occurs, PPC is used to bid on the most important keywords from the brands involved in the merger or acquisition and from the takeover brand by ensuring maximum clicks and visibility.
At the same time, it’s important that technical SEO is done correctly with any redirects and directing users to exactly where they need to be when searching. Whilst PPC is used for a more immediate effect, E-E-A-T content for SEO is crucial in the long run to ensure you’re helping your existing and new customers get the most from the new set-up.
Having a robust approach to reach your target audience, it ensures business continuity, less disruption, and maximised results.
Key takeaways
The main takeaway is that SEO is really important for writing powerful content that strengthens keywords, using terms that both companies would have been ranking for and ensuring there’s no cannibilisation. Then combining this with other areas of marketing, such as PPC, creates the most effective marketing strategy possible.
Need help with your M&A process? Feel free to give our expert team a call- we’d be happy to help give you the smoothest process possible, optimising every area of the site with SEO practices.
