Australian Institute of Criminology

An SEO strategy focussed on recovery & a framework for success.

Find out how Safari Digital worked with The Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) to implement a migration recovery strategy and create a technical and content framework for future success.

About The Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC)

The Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) is an Australian Government agency leading national research and the national knowledge centre on crime and criminal justice. As an Australian Government agency, the AIC is responsible for publishing a range of reports, research papers, and policy insight documents that pertain to homicide, domestic violence, deaths in custody, and the criminal justice system in Australia. The AIC website serves as a central resource for the Australian public and generates hundreds of thousands of organic visitors each year from journalists, policy makers, students, researchers, and the general public.

The Challenge

In 2020, the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) underwent a CMS migration. With no SEO best practices or guidance in place, the website saw a significant loss in organic traffic over the course of the migration and in the months that followed.

The migration resulted in:

A significant drop in organic traffic (>40%)
Hundreds of abandoned, high-performing pages
Hundreds of 404 pages and sitewide dead links
Hundreds of internal redirect chains
A loss of link equity
Referral traffic leading to 404 pages

To compound the problem, there was a significant traffic spike in mid-2020 which was driven by global social justice matters in the news which was masking the real damage to the website for a period of more than 6 months. Once this timely, topical traffic dropped off, the real damage caused by the mis-handled migration became evident.

What we uncovered upon an initial website audit:

47.7% year on year (YOY) organic traffic loss
10/25 top performing pages on the website from the previous year were now 404s
280+ high performing pages were now 404s
1,300+ backlinks from reputable news sources that were previously driving referral traffic were now pointing to 404s. Link equity was lost, referral traffic dropped, bounce rate spiked.
5,000+ broken internal link chains on the website reducing in fewer pages per session and lower time on site.

The Strategy

Our SEO recovery strategy for the AIC aimed to address the immediate technical issues which were hampering on-site experience, as well as identifying issues with how content was being handled and managed as new, similar resources were being published. Our SEO work focussed on four main objectives:

Redirect strategy & broken link reclamation
3XX + 4XX error resolution
On-page optimisation of key resources
Content best practices specifically focussing on handling cannibalisation and archiving of content

Beyond the immediate technical fixes that were implemented, we also worked with the AIC’s content team to create a long-term SEO framework designed to implement best practices for an organisation that publishes reports around similar topics.

Long-term strategy included:

Content litmus test: handling new content and a decision framework on whether pages should be updated or a new one created.
Keyword research integration: training on SEO tools to validate search volume and align content with actual search behaviour.
URL change protocol: Implemented best practices for updating URLs, archiving, and strategies to preserve link equity.
Keyword cannibalisation: Ongoing strategy to handle content cannibalisation issues that may arise around publishing similar/timely content and reports that closely match existing site content.

The Results

Our recovery strategy for the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) demonstrated the importance of a pre-emptive approach to website migrations. As always, planning from the outset is always the best approach, however, in this case we were able to work with the AIC team to resolve broken URLs, reclaim lost link equity, implement content archiving and planning best practices, and create a structured framework for future SEO success.