Unifying Digital Presence: How Healthcare Excellence Canada Consolidated Three Sites Without Losing SEO Value

When Healthcare Excellence Canada needed to merge two legacy websites into a single digital presence, they partnered with Out-Smarts to support the SEO strategy and technical execution. This case study details how strategic SEO audits, redirect mapping, and technical optimisation helped ensure a smooth transition without sacrificing search performance.

The SEO Challenge

Healthcare Excellence Canada (HEC) formed when the Canadian Foundation for Healthcare Improvement (CFHI) and the Canadian Patient Safety Institute (CPSI) came together. HEC works with partners to find, promote and spread healthcare quality and safety innovations, build capability, and drive policy change so that everyone in Canada can access safe, high-quality healthcare. Although HEC launched in 2021, the CFHI and CPSI websites remained active, making it hard to reflect the impact and scope of HEC’s work.. In 2024, HEC made the strategic decision to retire its legacy sites and formally transition its full digital presence under one unified platform. They engaged Out-Smarts to support the SEO aspects of the transition.

With a firm timeline and a significant volume of legacy content, Out Smarts was engaged to support the SEO and technical aspects of the transition. Our role was to help ensure that the migration preserved search visibility, minimized disruption, and aligned with the organization’s broader digital objectives.

The legacy organization  websites each housed a wealth of  content, including research, tools, and program materials built over many years. As an amalgamated organization, the HEC website had existed since amalgamation in 2021, though it now needed to serve as the central digital hub, replacing the legacy CFHI and CPSI sites.

Merging the sites presented several opportunities. It was very important to ensure that valuable content from the legacy sites didn’t disappear or create dead ends for users. HEC also sought to retain as much of the search engine authority as possible from those older domains.

Step 1: Multi-Site Audit with a Focus on SEO

We began the project with a comprehensive SEO audit of all three sites (CFHI, CPSI, and the existing HEC website). This means a full-scale, data-driven evaluation focused on performance, structure, and search engine visibility.

Key components of our audit included:

• Traffic performance over the previous 12 months, based on both Universal Analytics (UA) and GA4 data, including organic sessions and pageviews
• Backlink analysis, identifying which legacy pages had external inbound links and which held the most domain authority
• Technical health assessments, using tools like Screaming Frog and Google Search Console to identify indexing issues, redirect chains, and broken pages

This holistic view allowed us to decide, for each element, whether to preserve, redirect, or retire it. In addition, we kept a sharp eye on opportunities to streamline and improve content structure. We were also able to uncover new content opportunities for the new HEC site, identifying gaps where strategic additions could enhance both user experience and search visibility.

Step 2: Redirect Strategy, Prioritized by Value

From the audit insights, we developed a detailed redirect map that listed legacy URLs and mapped them to their new equivalents on the HEC site. We prioritized redirects based on SEO value, user relevance, and content importance.

This approach ensured:

• High-value pages with backlinks were preserved and redirected cleanly
• Users would be spared the misfortune of experiencing broken links
• Search engines would pass along as much authority as possible from old pages to their new forms

The redirect strategy also included guidance dedicated to managing legacy content. This included retiring outdated material, identifying overlapping resources to be potentially merged, and offering suggestions to improve internal links within the HEC site where appropriate.

Step 3: Technical SEO for the Existing HEC Site

As important as it was to repurpose the content of the previous sites, optimizing the current HEC website was paramount. Once we gained a comprehensive view of the previous sites’ SEO data, we locked onto the central goal: optimizing the current HEC website. We performed a dedicated technical audit to ensure strong search performance from day one. This included:

• Making sure search engines could find and index important pages
• Auditing metadata and heading structure to ensure clarity and alignment with content
• Flagging potential issues like duplicate content, thin pages, or missing schema markup
• Suggesting improvements to page speed and mobile responsiveness

Our goal was not just to preserve rankings, but to help future-proof the site for long-term growth.

Step 4: Deliverables That Saved Time and Supported Internal Teams

We knew the HEC team had a lot on their plate, so we structured our findings and recommendations in succinct, ordered reports. We emphasized the project’s priorities and tailored our input to be easily implemented.

These deliverables included both the essential and strategic outputs HEC required to ensure short-term success and long-term growth, such as:

• A detailed audit report for each site
• A prioritized redirection/link mapping document
• A tailored technical SEO checklist for the HEC site
• A strategic SEO roadmap to guide ongoing optimization, content planning, and growth over time

A Seamless Transition That Preserved SEO Value

Thanks to the collaborative efforts of the HEC team and Out-Smarts, the site migration was a success. Users were redirected to the right pages, search rankings stayed strong, and years of digital value were carried forward into the unified website.

This project demonstrates the power of strategic SEO in complex digital transitions. With the right approach, even the most intricate of site modifications make for stunning improvements, not setbacks.

Planning to migrate, consolidate, or redesign your website (or websites for that matter)? Get in touch with Out-Smarts and find out just how smooth the transition can be. The benefits of a professional, thoughtful transformation are magic.