Abbeyfield England has been providing sheltered and retirement housing across England and Wales for 70 years, with over 220 homes run through local societies nationwide. Previously, everything ran from abbeyfield.com, but following an internal restructure, the site was being split in two. We needed a way to do that cleanly, and keep as much traffic as possible in the process.
The situation: splitting a site in two
The brand was dividing into two: Abbeyfield Living and Abbeyfield England. Abbeyfield England would keep the bulk of the properties and pages, but the homepage and the social accounts were moving over with Abbeyfield Living.
That left us with a major problem. It meant all of the established brand traffic (and the single most powerful page on the site, responsible for over 40% of its traffic) would be going with the Living site instead.
Solution: lean into our strengths
We’d lost the brand traffic, but we still held the lion’s share of the homes and properties. That gave us an opening: expand into local search while building the new Abbeyfield England brand from the ground up.
So we invested heavily in local SEO: improving Google Business Profile listings, updating as many offsite listings as we could find, and strengthening the individual home and property pages. We also restructured how pages linked together, improving our ability to rank for localised search terms.
Alongside that, we helped individual societies host their own pages on the new site, strengthening their own performance while bringing everything together under one hub. Then we focused on what Abbeyfield does best: caring. Content was reworked across key pages, internal linking was tightened, and the language was made more human. Fundamentally, we set out to make the site easier to use for real people.
Results: growing the brand and replacing performance
Search visibility has continued to grow since the migration, with both visibility and keyword rankings climbing steadily. Enquiries on the new site are outperforming the old one, though part of that is down to us reworking and improving the tracking that was already in place.
The key finding: organic traffic only dropped by around 15% overall, and it’s continuing to recover. Even when you strip out the single page that used to drive 40% of that traffic on its own, the wider drop was still only a small amount and that gap is closing further every month.
Moving forward: growing with a plan
The client’s team have now taken the day-to-day work in-house and are working through an extensive content plan that will keep improving performance. They’re also building out the social and wider marketing side of the brand, setting Abbeyfield England up to keep growing for years to come
Conclusions: leaning into your strengths can make up for lost assets
It’s very easy to get nervous looking at a situation like this. We’d lost key assets from a site that had driven the bulk of its performance. But rather than dwell on that, we needed to look at our other strengths and lean into those instead.
Every business has a strength. Sometimes, you just need help finding it.