The Evewell is a London fertility clinic. When it decided to rebuild its WordPress website, the risk was clear: a redesign is the moment a site is most likely to lose the search visibility it has spent years earning. My job was to make sure that didn’t happen, and to use the rebuild to fix what was holding the clinic’s most important pages back.
At a glance
| Client | The Evewell, London |
| Type | Healthcare, fertility clinic |
| Platform | WordPress (redesign on the same platform) |
| Work | Pre-migration SEO audit, 207-URL redirect map, site structure and URL keyword map, developer and content briefs, schema templates |
The commercial problem
For a fertility clinic, treatment pages are where patients research and decide. The data showed those pages weren’t converting their visibility the way they should. The IVF page, the most searched treatment, was drawing around 364,000 impressions a year but only 133 clicks, at an average position of 22.9.
At the same time, the redesign put pages that already brought in visits at risk. Some of the most visited pages sat outside the main site structure, which makes them easy to rename, move or forget during a rebuild.
What the data showed
The pre-migration audit combined Search Console data, a full crawl, third-party search data and analytics. A few findings shaped the whole project:
- Misplaced high-traffic pages. One page sitting outside the /support/ section drew 5,145 clicks a year, the ninth-highest traffic page on the site. Tidying it into the new structure without a redirect would have sent those clicks to an error page overnight.
- Broken redirects already in place. An old IVF landing page redirected to a URL that itself returned a 404, so anyone following it hit a dead end.
- Pages splitting authority. A cost guide with around 60,000 impressions a year and the pricing page with around 390,000 were competing for overlapping cost searches.
- Mobile-first visitors with no breadcrumbs. Around 81.5% of organic visits were on mobile, and the site had no breadcrumb navigation to help those visitors move around.
The SEO and AI search strategy
The redesign plan had two jobs: protect what the site already had, and use the rebuild to grow the pages that matter most. It ran across seven areas:
| Area | The aim | What it involved |
|---|---|---|
| Protect existing visibility | Keep every page that earns traffic or links | The 207-URL redirect map, and explicit protection for high-traffic pages outside the main structure |
| Technical fixes | Clear existing faults before they’re rebuilt into the new site | Broken redirects fixed, breadcrumbs with BreadcrumbList schema added |
| Site structure | One clear page for each treatment, condition and cost question | A proposed structure and URL keyword map, and a decision on overlapping cost and pricing pages |
| Treatment page content | Turn large impression numbers into clicks and enquiries | Content briefs for each treatment page, starting with IVF |
| AI search readiness | Be the clinic AI Overviews quote on fertility questions | Short, quotable answers near the top of treatment pages, full FAQs and named clinician authors |
| Schema | Help search engines and AI systems understand the clinic, its treatments and its clinicians | Schema templates for treatment, condition and clinician pages |
| Launch and recovery | Catch problems while they’re still small | Briefs for launch day and after launch, with Search Console monitoring |
What was done
Everything was built around a 207-URL redirect map, referenced throughout, so every old URL had a confirmed destination before the build began.
The findings then became briefs, one issue per brief, across four stages: before the build, during the build, launch day and after launch. Development briefs covered actions like fixing the broken IVF redirect, keeping the high-traffic misplaced page at exactly its current URL, and adding breadcrumbs with BreadcrumbList schema. Content briefs set out what each treatment page needed, referencing a URL keyword map.
For the IVF page, for example, the brief called for a short, quotable answer to “what is IVF treatment?” near the top, the clinic’s step-by-step process, clinic-specific success rate data, a named clinician author, a full FAQ and clear calls to action.
Where the right move depended on the clinic’s own decisions, the brief set out the options. For the cost guide and pricing page, that meant either redirecting the guide into a new IVF pricing page, or keeping it as a distinct cost guide linking to a price list, depending on what the pricing page would contain.
Schema templates covered treatment, condition and clinician pages.
My contribution
I worked on Evewell as a freelancer from June 2026, producing the SEO action briefs for the redesign: 13 development briefs and 16 content briefs for the live site before the build, plus schema templates for treatment, condition and clinician pages. The new site itself is being built by the clinic’s developer.
The result
The new site is due to launch in late 2026, so there are no results to report yet.
What I learned
Pages that sit outside a site’s main folders are the ones most likely to be lost in a redesign. They don’t fit the new structure neatly, so someone tidies them into it. Mapping those pages explicitly, and confirming a redirect before any URL changes, is what protects them.
SEO has the most influence before a redesign starts. Once templates and URLs are built, changing them is slow and expensive, so the briefs went to the developer while those decisions were still easy to make.
Limitations
A pre-migration audit protects what a site has. Whether the treatment pages grow depends on the content briefs being carried out and on the clinic’s competitors, and the final outcome depends on how closely the build follows the redirect map.
Services used
This project drew on redesigns and relaunches, schema markup and WordPress websites, with the audit run through the site audit system. It sits in healthcare and clinics, and the Kwiat migration case study shows the same thinking applied to a platform move.
FAQ
What is a pre-migration SEO audit?
A pre-migration SEO audit is a review of a website’s search performance and technical set-up before a redesign or platform move. It records which pages bring in traffic, maps every URL to its new home, flags risks and sets out what the new site needs, so the build protects existing visibility rather than losing it.
What is a redirect map?
A redirect map is a spreadsheet listing every old URL on a website alongside the new URL it should redirect to after a redesign or migration. It’s checked before launch so no page that earns traffic or links is left pointing at an error, and it’s used again after launch to confirm the redirects work.
Does a website redesign affect SEO?
A redesign can affect SEO a lot, even on the same platform. Changing URLs, templates, content, headings and internal links all change how Google sees the site. Planned properly, a redesign can improve visibility. Done without a redirect map and SEO checks, it can lose rankings that took years to build.
Rebuilding your site?
Get in touch before the build starts, or read the site migration checklist.