Steenberg Farm
Protecting Organic Traffic & Revenue Through a Complex SEO Website Migration
Steenberg Farm
Protecting Organic Traffic & Revenue Through a Complex SEO Website Migration
Steenberg Farm
• SEO Migration
• Technical SEO
• eCommerce SEO
• Content Optimisation
• Website Performance
SEO Migration • Technical SEO • eCommerce SEO • Content Optimisation • Website Performance
Steenberg Farm approached Capitalize Digital while undertaking a major redevelopment of its website.
The objective was clear: launch an entirely new digital experience without sacrificing the organic search visibility, traffic and revenue the existing website had built over time.
This was no ordinary website migration.
Steenberg's extensive digital ecosystem supports several important revenue streams, including its five-star accommodation, restaurants, championship golf course, spa, wine tasting experiences and online wine shop.
Every commercial section, URL, piece of content and customer journey therefore needed to be accounted for as part of the migration.
Capitalize worked closely with Steenberg's internal, IT, content and development teams in the months leading up to launch — and continued monitoring and optimisation following migration — to protect existing organic equity while establishing a stronger SEO foundation for future growth.
Large website migrations can introduce significant organic search risk.
Changes to URLs, content, site architecture, internal linking, metadata, indexation or technical infrastructure can result in lost rankings and traffic if they aren't correctly managed.
For Steenberg, this risk extended beyond website traffic.
Organic search supports multiple commercial areas of the business:
A decline in organic visibility could therefore have had a direct impact across several revenue streams.
Our role wasn't simply to optimise the new website after it launched.
It was to audit, plan, protect and migrate Steenberg's existing organic footprint while ensuring the new website launched with the strongest possible technical and content foundation.
One of the most important strategic decisions happened before migration.
During the redevelopment process, Steenberg's online shop was being considered for migration onto its own subdomain.
While technically possible, from an SEO perspective this introduced unnecessary risk.
The existing online store had already accumulated organic authority, rankings and search visibility as part of Steenberg's primary domain.
Moving the shop onto a separate subdomain could have disrupted that existing equity, potentially resulting in lost organic visibility, reduced eCommerce traffic and missed online revenue.
Our recommendation was to keep the online shop within Steenberg's root domain.
Working closely with Steenberg's internal IT and development teams, this structure was retained.
This helped protect existing eCommerce authority while maintaining a stronger connection between Steenberg's brand, wine-related content and transactional online shop.
Before launch, we conducted an extensive crawl and technical audit of the staging website against Steenberg's existing organic footprint.
Rather than waiting for issues to appear after migration, we worked through a detailed pre-migration SEO checklist covering the elements most likely to impact search performance.
This included:
The process identified actionable issues before launch, including pages with missing H1 headings and pages requiring metadata, allowing these to be addressed with the development team before they could affect the live site's organic performance.
Not every page carries equal organic value.
We reviewed Steenberg's existing website to understand which URLs, landing pages and sections were already contributing to search visibility and commercial activity.
Priority pages were then assessed individually to ensure:
This was particularly important across Steenberg's major commercial offerings.
One of the highest-risk elements of any migration is changing URLs without correctly transferring their existing authority.
We compared the existing live URLs against the new website architecture and built a detailed redirect map.
Every important legacy URL needed either:
1. A matching URL on the new website, or
2. An appropriate 301 redirect to the most relevant new destination.
This helped minimise the risk of:
Redirect implementation was reviewed and tested rather than being treated as a post-launch afterthought.
Steenberg couldn't be approached as a conventional single-purpose website.
We treated its major commercial areas as interconnected organic search ecosystems.
Protecting and growing visibility around high-intent hotel, accommodation, suite and booking-related searches.
Ensuring Steenberg's dining experiences and restaurant pages remained properly structured, discoverable and optimised.
Protecting organic visibility around Steenberg's championship golf course and associated search demand.
Optimising spa and wellness pages around relevant customer search intent.
Strengthening search relevance around Steenberg's wine estate, tasting experiences and related searches.
Protecting product and category visibility while maintaining the eCommerce store as part of the primary Steenberg domain.
This ensured the migration considered commercial outcomes — not simply rankings.
We worked closely with Steenberg's internal content team to align premium brand content with organic search requirements.
Existing and new pages were reviewed for:
Metadata was also assessed for appropriate length and alignment with each Steenberg offering rather than simply checking whether metadata existed.
The objective wasn't to compromise Steenberg's premium brand language with excessive keyword optimisation.
It was to ensure that strong brand content could also be correctly understood, indexed and ranked by search engines.
Technical SEO formed a substantial part of the migration.
Capitalize worked directly with the development team to review and address technical considerations throughout staging and launch.
This included:
Structured data was also reviewed across relevant page types, including opportunities around:
Organisation • Local Business • Hotel • Restaurant • Winery • Spa • Breadcrumb schema
Schema implementation was checked against visible page content and reviewed for potential errors, conflicts or duplication.
A successful migration also depends on ensuring Google is shown the right pages at the right time.
During staging, we reviewed noindex requirements, sitemap structure, canonicalisation and robots directives.
Unnecessary sitemap elements and archive structures were identified, while important pages were accounted for ahead of launch.
The launch process included preparing the final sitemap for submission, ensuring staging URLs weren't inadvertently submitted to Google and confirming that important live pages could be crawled and indexed correctly following migration.
This helped Google understand the new site architecture as efficiently as possible.
For a premium hospitality and lifestyle brand such as Steenberg, the website needed to remain highly visual.
But large imagery, galleries and rich digital experiences can introduce performance issues — particularly on mobile.
Our migration checks therefore extended beyond conventional technical SEO.
We reviewed:
The goal was to find the right balance between premium visual presentation, customer experience and organic search performance.
A migration isn't complete when the new website goes live.
Following launch, we continued working closely with the Steenberg and development teams to validate the migration and identify any issues as Google began crawling the new website.
This included monitoring:
The site could then be re-crawled and compared against the benchmarks established before migration.
The Steenberg migration was successfully completed while protecting the organic visibility of a large, commercially complex website.
Comparing 10 July–13 September against the preceding matched 66-day period, the website recorded positive growth in organic traffic and search performance following migration.
+9.1% Organic Sessions
Organic sessions increased by 9.1%
+7.6% Google Search Clicks
Organic clicks increased by 7.6%
6.0% → 6.5% Organic CTR
Google organic click-through rate improved by 0.5 percentage points, while overall search impressions remained broadly stable.
+0.6 Positions in Average Google Rankings
Average organic rankings improved by approximately 0.6 positions overall following the migration.
Several commercially and strategically important searches also strengthened:
For a migration of this scale, success wasn't simply about generating an immediate spike in traffic.
The first priority was ensuring that Steenberg didn't lose the organic visibility and search equity it had spent years building as hundreds of pages, multiple customer journeys and several revenue-generating areas transitioned onto the new website.
With search impressions remaining stable, organic sessions increasing 9.1%, Google Search clicks increasing 7.6%, CTR improving and average rankings strengthening, the post-migration data demonstrates that Steenberg successfully protected its organic foundation while creating a stronger platform for continued SEO growth.
The result: a complex website migration completed without sacrificing organic search momentum — and with measurable improvements in traffic, engagement with search results and key Google rankings.
Steenberg demonstrates why SEO migration planning needs to begin before a new website launches — not after traffic starts declining.
Through detailed auditing, technical SEO, URL mapping, content optimisation and close collaboration between Capitalize, Steenberg's internal teams and its development partners, we were able to account for hundreds of moving parts before the new website went live.
Most importantly, the project successfully:
SEO wasn't treated as a final launch checklist. It was integrated into the migration from the beginning.
That approach allowed Steenberg to launch its new digital experience with confidence — protecting what had already been built while creating a stronger platform for the next stage of organic growth.
SEO Strategy • SEO Migration • Technical SEO Audit • Staging Website Audit • URL & 301 Redirect Mapping • eCommerce SEO • On-Page SEO • Content Optimisation • Metadata Optimisation • Schema Markup • Mobile SEO • Website Performance • Indexation & Sitemap Management • Google Search Console • GA4 Analysis • Post-Migration Monitoring • Google My Business Optimisation
A new website should improve your digital performance — not reset years of organic search growth.
Capitalize Digital helps businesses plan and execute SEO-led website migrations that protect rankings, traffic and revenue while establishing a stronger foundation for future organic growth.
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