SEO project for Portsmouth-based Further Education college

City of Portsmouth College is a further education college offering a wide range of courses for school leavers and mature learners. Located in Portsmouth, the college provides vocational training, apprenticeships, higher education courses, and adult education. The college is dedicated to fostering a supportive and dynamic learning environment, ensuring students achieve their academic and professional goals. Their mission focuses on equipping students with the skills and knowledge necessary to thrive in their chosen careers and contribute positively to society.

With a rebrand and an upcoming merger, City of Portsmouth College needed to build a new website. The team tasked with this project initially overlooked the SEO implications of the redesign, including the necessity for numerous redirects from the existing sites. This oversight could potentially have led to a significant loss of organic traffic and a drop in search engine rankings.

To address this challenge, we took the following steps:

• Site Crawling: We conducted a comprehensive crawl of the existing websites to catalogue all current URLs. This gave us a clear picture of the site’s structure and content.
  Development Site Analysis: Similarly, we crawled the new site in its development environment to understand its layout and new URL structure.
• Redirect Plan: Based on the information gathered, we meticulously planned and supported the implementation of 7468 redirects. This ensured that all traffic from old URLs seamlessly redirected to the new site, preserving SEO value and user experience.