How a Bergen audit firm merged three office websites without losing a single ranking
Headline sounding
+71%
organic leads after merger
Bergen, Norway · 7 months · Signal plan
01Notice to mariners
Three hulls, one harbour mouth.
After a merger, three legacy sites competed for the same audit terms in Norwegian and English, and a consolidation risked wiping out years of equity.
The merger brought together a Bergen head office, a Stavanger practice and an Oslo team that worked in English for international clients. Each office brought its own website: brekstadrevisjon.no, vestkystrevisjon.no, nordhansa-audit.com. Between them they held 2,840 indexed URLs and more than a decade of backlinks from industry bodies and the business press.
Search engines saw three firms with the same name competing for “revisor Bergen”. English visitors landed on Norwegian pages. The partners wanted one brand quickly, and a careless switch-over could have sunk years of ranking equity in a single weekend.
02Hydrographic survey
Before anything moved, we sounded every metre of seabed.
We crawled each site, joined the crawl to Search Console, backlink and server-log data, then charted the hazards. Pick a site to run the sonar.
Soundings · Bergen (head office)
brekstadrevisjon.no
- 1.Wreck
Two versions of every service page (/tjenester/ and /revisjon/) splitting links and rankings.
- 2.Hazard
Mobile LCP 3.9s: a 1.8 MB hero photo and a render-blocking cookie script on every template.
- 3.Shoal
214 orphan pages, among them 60 sector guides that only the XML sitemap links to.
03Plotting the channel
Four chart symbols, one safe route.
The engagement ran on our Signal plan: technical SEO first, with every change measured against a baseline before the next one went out.
- 01 · Leading line
Site migration
Three domains folded into brekstadrevisjon.no in one planned crossing.
2,840 URLs mapped one to one (no blanket redirects to the homepage), 301s served at the edge, chains collapsed to a single hop, and a Change of Address submitted for each domain. Server logs were checked every day for 30 days.
- 02 · Two-light buoy
Hreflang
Norwegian and English kept apart, so each market sees its own page.
Subfolders /nb/ and /en/ with reciprocal hreflang, x-default to /en/, and language-matched canonicals. Each overlapping keyword was given one winner, so Bergen and Stavanger stopped competing.
- 03 · Transit marks
Internal linking
Link equity steered to the pages that bring in audit enquiries.
Eight service hubs (statutory audit, IFRS, attestation, transfer pricing…) each linked from sector guides, office pages and the 214 former orphans. Every important page now sits three clicks or fewer from the homepage.
- 04 · Depth clearance
Core Web Vitals
A faster hull: mobile LCP from 3.9s to 1.7s.
AVIF hero images with explicit sizes, the cookie banner loaded only after consent, a subset system font stack, and preconnects trimmed. Performance budgets now run in CI on every template.
04Tide table · 7 months
A planned low tide at cutover, then a flood.
Organic leads from all three sites combined, indexed to 100 before the merger. We forecast the month-4 dip in advance and told the partners how deep it would go. It went no deeper.
Log · month 4 · Cutover
Switched all three domains in one night. 301s were served at the edge, and both sitemaps and Search Console moves were submitted.
- Lead index
- 94
- Page-1 kept
- 96%
05Arrival soundings
Into harbour with 98% of the cargo intact.
Organic leads
+71%
Index 100 → 171, M1–M7
Redirects mapped
2,840
- brekstadrevisjon.no1,260
- vestkystrevisjon.no940
- nordhansa-audit.com640
Rankings retained
98%
404 of 412 tracked page-1 terms held through cutover
LCP (mobile)
3.9s → 1.7s
Dashed line: 2.5s “good” threshold
Modelled scenario for a fictional business — not a client result. Rankings and traffic are never guaranteed; see our Terms.
Position soundings, before and after
Best position of any of the three legacy sites vs. the merged domain, month 7. 6,470 combined monthly searches.
| Keyword | Lang | Volume | Before | After | Movement |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| revisor bergen | nb | 1,900 | 4 | 2 | ▲ 2 |
| revisjonsselskap bergen | nb | 720 | 6 | 3 | ▲ 3 |
| revisor stavanger | nb | 1,300 | 3 | 3 | held |
| lovpålagt revisjon | nb | 880 | 9 | 4 | ▲ 5 |
| audit firm norway | en | 590 | 14 | 5 | ▲ 9 |
| ifrs audit oslo | en | 210 | 7 | 6 | ▲ 1 |
| transfer pricing norway | en | 390 | 11 | 7 | ▲ 4 |
| attestasjon revisor | nb | 480 | 5 | 5 | held |
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