Client Story · Payments · Relaunch, October 2022

A 2,011-page relaunch with no dip, and lower-funnel conversions up 21%

Mollie, the European payments company. I led SEO in-house.

+21%

lower-funnel conversions the month after launch

+73%

organic sessions on lower-funnel pages the month after launch

+2%

monthly impressions, against a plan that allowed a 10% drop

Book a free strategy call

the short version

The situation: a 2,011-page site where 90% of SEO requests needed a developer, moving to a new platform across several markets.
The move: SEO written into the requirements from the first scoping week, 290 SEO tickets triaged daily by what would block the launch, and management told what to expect before launch day.
The result: the month after launch, organic sessions rose 9%, lower-funnel sessions 73% and lower-funnel conversions 21%.
The lesson: most of the 290 tickets could wait. Deciding which ones could not was the work.

The situation

I led SEO at Mollie, the Amsterdam payments company, when it rebuilt mollie.com in 2022. The business had four reasons for a new site: a new brand, marketing that could publish without waiting on developers, better localisation for its markets, and a site built with SEO in mind from the start.

The old site had been called SEO compliant by people who were not SEOs. In practice, 90% of SEO requests needed a developer. A new landing page template took two or three developers plus UX and design two to three weeks. Every redirect was a one-off developer ticket. An HTML sitemap took seven months to ship. The one page type built for search grew 645% in a year; most other page types stood still or declined.

A relaunch fixes that, or it wipes out years of rankings on launch day. The goal I set: impressions down no more than 10%, and no dip at launch or in the two to three months after.

The SEO side was me, one colleague and an external SEO agency, working with Mollie's web team (a product manager and three developers) and an outside development agency. SEO was involved from January 2022, a month before scoping started. The plan said six months from scoping to launch. Launch came on 31 October 2022.

What I did

The move	Why it mattered
SEO requirements in the first scoping round	URLs, header and footer, homepage, hreflang and canonicals were written down as requirements for developers, not raised after the templates were built. I tagged the owner of each one, held one-to-ones every two weeks and followed up until it was done.
A content audit before anything moved	20% of pages were not migrated. The cost, measured before the decision: 1% of organic traffic and one conversion.
Staging crawled like the live site	I crawled staging to test the new platform before launch and took the findings to the developers with data attached, so every fix request came with a reason.
Four priority levels, reviewed daily	290 SEO tickets, 31 of them critical. "Highest" meant I would block the launch (wrong canonicals). "High" meant I might, but the web team could choose to go ahead (missing migrated pages). "Medium" had to be fixed within two days of launch (faulty redirects). "Low" meant someday (URL localisation, imperfect copy in secondary markets). Close to launch I re-ranked the list several times a day.
Management told what to expect before launch	Four weeks out, a call with the CMO, CCO, CTO, CPO and CEO on what a relaunch does to organic traffic. The day before, where things stood and how confident I was. Daily emails the first week, weekly after that, and a results deck a month in.

See the Migration Risk Assessment

What happened

Measured the month after launch against the month before:

+21% on the lower-funnel conversion point
+73% organic sessions on lower-funnel pages
+9% organic sessions overall, +7% in the Netherlands, the largest market
+2% monthly impressions, against a plan that allowed a 10% drop
0.5% of non-brand queries dropped out of positions 1 to 3

The site underneath changed too. Most pages now sit three to four clicks from the homepage, where a large share used to sit ten or more deep. Sitemaps, breadcrumbs, hreflang, canonicals and URL mapping are handled by the platform, not by a developer ticket. Redirects moved from the tech team to the people who own the content.

The work won the Friends of Search award for best SEO case in 2023.

What I'd tell you honestly

Plenty went wrong, and the launch held anyway. I had no access to server logs. The keyword research planned for the product pages never happened. My team worked out URL localisation, and development dropped it late in the project. Content was frozen for six weeks before launch. The launch date was set on a Friday, for the following Monday. None of that showed in the numbers, because the tickets that could hurt performance were fixed first.

"We handle SEO" is not a plan. The development agency said it handled SEO because it had installed Yoast. If you are rebuilding with an agency, ask them what they check and when, and have someone on your side who knows the answer. A lot of time would have been saved if the agency had had its own SEO consultant.

Most of the 290 tickets could wait. The hardest part was letting go of SEO perfectionism: questioning every ticket on whether it would hurt performance or only bother an SEO. Developers stay on side when they help make those calls instead of taking orders, and when they care enough about SEO to worry about breaking it.

This site has since been replaced. Mollie moved to a new CMS and design again in February 2024. This story covers the 2022 relaunch only.

The migration checklist is the same method, written down for a site you are about to move.

Baba

I’m Baba, an independent SEO consultant helping B2B companies, SaaS startups, and e-commerce brands turn SEO into a real growth lever. With 14+ years of experience, I work at the intersection of strategy, execution, and commercial impact, focusing on actions that drive revenue, not vanity metrics. I partner with growth-minded teams to solve complex SEO challenges, build internal buy-in, and create strategies that align SEO with business priorities. I also organize the Amsterdam SEO Salon, where practitioners and leaders exchange insights that shape the future of search.

Published 29 September 2026.

contact