A merger or acquisition is a critical inflection point for any organization. Beyond the legal and financial considerations, it’s important to realize that you're acquiring more than a roster of talent, products and market share. You also have to thoughtfully but swiftly address the acquired company’s digital real estate, the centerpiece of which is often their website.
The process of updating a website following the acquisition is more than just technical; it requires you to make major brand and content decisions along the way as part of the brand acquisition strategy. As a result, the process calls for up-front assessment and planning before a pixel is pushed or a line of code is entered.
At AvreaFoster, we’ve helped countless B2B brands navigate this uncertain terrain after acquiring a company, and we’re sharing the insights we’ve learned throughout those journeys to make yours a little easier.
Overview: FAQs About Website Updates Post-Acquisition
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Step 1: Establishing the Integration Strategy
The first step is to decide how the acquired brand’s existing website will be amended and integrated following its sale. None of these choices are wrong, but it’s important that the direction you choose is strategically aligned with your larger business objectives.
The most common approaches include:
- Full Integration: Migrating the acquired brand’s content and integrating it into your existing website to create a singular digital presence. This most often is done when the acquired brand is being removed from the market entirely.
- Branded Subsection (Partial Integration): Migrating the acquired brand’s content into your existing website, but giving it dedicated branded real estate or a separate subdomain. This maintains some brand autonomy, preserving its identity while still broadcasting the relationship.
- Standalone Site (Website Rebrand): Retaining the acquired company’s website as a separate entity, with the option of executing visual updates to create more cohesion between the acquired brand and the parent brand. This approach has a spectrum of possibilities, ranging from not broadcasting the merger or acquisition at all to holistically updating the website’s look and feel to maintain just the brand name itself.
All of these options have merit and their own unique considerations. The determining factors should include how to best leverage the acquired brand’s equity, the website’s SEO authority and audience clarity.
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Assessing the Digital Landscape
Before making website changes, it’s important that you develop a deep understanding of the existing site’s attributes. This includes how it performs for users — from a technical standpoint and in terms of SEO.
This step helps to ensure that you’re capitalizing on the acquired website’s strengths and are prepared to improve upon its weaknesses. Some of these considerations include:
- Creative Audit: Audit the website’s tone of voice, UI/UX choices, imagery styles and general design aesthetics. Decide the degree to which the acquired brand and website need to comply with your existing brand standards, and create an action plan to make the necessary updates.
- Content Evaluation: Using analytics tools, identify the highest-performing content pages and assets (like blog posts) and protect those from major changes. Take note of the most successful user journeys and work to maintain them after the website revamp.
- Technical Review: Examine the site’s infrastructure. Are you comfortable with the CMS it’s on? What about the hosting environment? Are third-party integrations secure and up to date? If there are any steps needed to facilitate compatibility between the acquired website and your digital tools, now is the time to take note of them.
- SEO Analysis: What you don’t want to do is lose all the search authority the acquired website has earned. Assess its search rankings, backlink profile and keyword performance and then develop a plan to maintain the areas of success.
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Step 3: Creating Messaging and Visual Consistency
Based on your creative audit, you should have a feel for which user-facing updates are required to bring the website into brand compliance and elevate its engagement.
Consider the following creative tasks:
- Messaging Updates/Integration: From headlines and call-to-action copy to body content and legal pages, take the necessary steps to align all of the website’s copy with your brand voice. That doesn’t mean you have to rewrite absolutely everything, but it does mean amending messaging that could confuse users or create dissonance between the two brands and websites.
- Visual Updates/Integration: The degree to which design changes are required will be determined by what changes you’re making to the acquired company’s branding. If their brand is being largely maintained, the downstream impact on the website’s look and feel could be minimal. If the acquired brand is being changed drastically, new brand standards should be created and the website will need to be updated accordingly.
- Audience Communication: This is optional, but it’s our strong recommendation that you take a curated approach to how any brand and website changes are communicated. Through tactics like a homepage modal pop-up, proactive emailing or leveraging highly visible website real estate, inform website visitors of the changes you expect them to notice, the rationale behind these updates and why all of this change is actually of great benefit to them.
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Step 4: Migrating High-Value Content
Leaning on analytics and insights from the acquired company’s marketing team, you should have a rundown of the content pieces most critical to the brand’s success and prioritize those in your branded content integration roadmap.
Some of these may be blog articles or downloadable PDFs, in which case the migration will likely be simple. Make the necessary aesthetic updates, ensure URL continuity and you’re good to go.
However, other pieces of high-value content could be more complicated. Think proprietary tools like cost calculators, multistep gated workflows and interactive product demos. These may require more legwork and direct collaboration with the stakeholders who are responsible for those assets.
It’s also likely that these assets are being deployed and tracked via the acquired company’s CRM, like HubSpot or Salesforce. Migration here means also migrating all of the logic, automation and tracking scripts that underpin the user-facing content.
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Step 5: Preserving and Enhancing SEO Performance
Chances are, the brand you’ve acquired was doing something right with their approach to SEO, and now it’s your job to maintain that momentum. At the same time, mergers and acquisitions are often highly buzzed-about events, which could lead to a spike in search traffic.
For both of those reasons, SEO continuity should be top of mind. Take into account:
- SEO Copy: Be sure that user-facing copy, page titles, meta descriptions and image alt text are in place; follow best practices; and utilize appropriate keywords.
- Technical SEO: Ensure the site adheres to current SEO best practices, including sitemap structure, device type responsiveness, load speed performance and structured data implementation.
- Content Optimization: Based on your insights from the two steps we just outlined, update content for relevant keywords to improve search rankings — particularly if the merger or acquisition has expanded or shifted the keyword list.
- 301 Redirects: If the website updates are having any impact on URL structure, large or small, a redirect strategy will need to be implemented to connect legacy URLs to their new counterparts. This maintains link equity and prevents broken links.
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Step 6: Training and Continuous Improvement
- Like any website, this one is a living, breathing marketing machine. Just because you’ve completed steps 1-5 doesn’t mean you can set it and forget it. Instead, you need to monitor how the website performs after the updates have been implemented (both technically and in terms of user behavior) and make changes accordingly.
Track changes against benchmarks in:
- Website Traffic
- Traffic Behavior
- Conversion Rates
- User Engagement
Use these insights to make data-driven decisions and refine your digital strategy indefinitely. No matter how much you hone it, your website can never be sharp enough.
It is also important that you empower those charged with utilizing the website, regardless of which team they came from. That means conducting training sessions and providing resources that mitigate confusion and prevent headaches.
Engage key stakeholders early and often in areas such as:
- Marketing and Communications
- IT, Development and Cybersecurity
- Sales
- Customer Service and Support
Need support? AvreaFoster can lend a hand.
A merger or acquisition is an exciting time for any business, but it also comes with a seemingly endless list of tasks to get done. In spite of that, it’s very important that the updates to the acquired company’s website are executed with haste and precision, as they directly impact brand perception, customer experience and, ultimately, the success of the acquisition itself.
At AvreaFoster, we are the team B2B brands depend on to navigate inflection points and facilitate growth. If you’re facing an uphill website battle in the midst of a complex merger or acquisition, let’s connect to see how we can support your journey and create a website experience that aligns with your strategic vision.
