Case study
The first job was to lose nothing. The second was to grow from there.
Study NSW was rebuilding and rebranding a government website used by prospective international students in more than 190 countries. For a government service with multiple stakeholders, international audiences and no tolerance for disruption, the migration risk was larger than usual. We built SEO into the rebuild before launch, protected the visibility the existing site had already earned, then used the new architecture as the foundation for growth.
The challenge
Study NSW supports international students and promotes NSW as a study destination. While the site was being rebuilt and rebranded, the programme had to protect existing organic visibility, live government services, the authority accumulated across legacy URLs, performance for international users, and the reporting requirements of multiple stakeholders.
The site could not launch and have SEO fixed afterwards. By then, any migration damage would already have happened.
Nothing valuable could disappear during the move. Growth could come afterwards.
- A live government service with no tolerance for downtime
- Multiple stakeholders across DEIT, government communications and development
- A rebuild and rebrand happening alongside the migration
- International audiences searching differently across source markets
The result
The migration protected the existing search asset. The rebuild gave it room to grow.
The site moved without ranking disruption. The clean migration did not cause the growth that followed; it meant the next phase could be spent building visibility rather than recovering what the rebuild had lost. Sessions are tracked on the new site from the July 2022 migration.
- +319%
- Organic traffic Published case study · new-site tracking
- +181%
- Ranking keywords Published case study
- +178%
- Top-3 ranking keywords Published case study
- 2.1k
- Monthly organic sessions at peak October 2024
The insight
Migration SEO starts before the new site goes live.
The riskiest point in the programme was the cutover. If redirects were wrong, URLs disappeared, internal relationships changed unexpectedly or the rebuilt site introduced technical problems, years of accumulated visibility could be lost in a single release.
So SEO was treated as part of the rebuild itself, not a post-launch optimisation task. That changed the programme from launch, discover problems and recover, to protect, launch cleanly and grow.
The strategy
Protect what had already been earned. Build the next stage into the rebuild.
- Map the old site to the new one before launch.Every legacy URL was mapped to its closest equivalent on the rebuilt site. Redirects were tested in staging before production, the new site had an SEO and performance review before cutover, and rankings were monitored closely through launch. The objective was not merely to avoid broken links. It was to preserve the search equity and user pathways the old site had accumulated.
- Build SEO into the new architecture.Rather than treating the rebuild as a design project followed by an SEO project, technical search requirements were built into the new site itself: structured data, a clearer internal-linking model, mobile-first performance, Core Web Vitals discipline and cleaner site architecture. The rebuilt site launched with a foundation for growth rather than a list of SEO defects waiting to be repaired.
- Optimise for the markets Study NSW serves.Once the migration was stable, the programme shifted from protection to expansion. Search opportunities were mapped across priority international student source markets, content was optimised within government communication requirements, and performance was measured against the outcomes stakeholders needed to report.
The sequence
Protect. Launch cleanly. Then grow.
- Before launchLegacy URL mapping · redirect planning · technical QA · performance testing
- CutoverServices remain live · redirects preserved · rankings monitored
- After launchInternational demand mapping · content optimisation · internal-link expansion · measurement
- GrowthOrganic traffic, ranking keywords and top-3 rankings all grew from the new foundation
What we did
Migration planning. Mapped legacy URLs to their new equivalents, created and tested the redirect plan in staging, audited the rebuilt site before cutover and coordinated the launch sequence across government, communications and development stakeholders.
Technical foundation. Built structured data, internal-link architecture, clean URL handling, mobile-first performance and Core Web Vitals considerations into the new site rather than retrofitting them after launch.
International search optimisation. Researched opportunities across priority source markets and built content around the questions prospective international students were actually searching, within Study NSW's communication requirements.
Measurement. Established reporting that tracked search performance after migration and connected the programme to the sector-recovery outcomes stakeholders needed visibility over.
The takeaway
A successful migration should preserve more than URLs.
Study NSW needed the rebuilt site to launch without disrupting services or sacrificing the visibility the old site had already earned. But protecting the past was only half the job. By building SEO into the rebuild itself, the new site became a stronger foundation for international discovery rather than a redesigned version of what came before.
Nothing important was lost in the move. Then search performance grew from the new foundation.
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