SEO Website Migration Drives Traffic and Book Sales Growth for Author Homer L. Hartage

Homer L. Hartage is an author and advocate for aging, dementia and family care. He draws on decades of experience leading AgedCare Guardianship services and the Hartage Foundation, the not-for-profit that publishes his books.
His titles include The Memory Box & Charlotte’s Big Surprise, a children’s book that explains Alzheimer’s through a young girl’s eyes. Family and Professional Guardianship is a practical guide for families and professional guardians. Parentification: Caregivers in Crisis looks at children who take on adult caring roles.
His website serves parents, caregivers, educators and guardians. It holds book pages, a resource centre, curriculum material, press releases and a media library. Like most sites in the publishing industry, it has two jobs. It must help people find answers in search, and it must turn that interest into book sales.

The old site ran on an off-the-shelf WordPress theme. On mobile, the main content took 7.7 seconds to appear in Google PageSpeed Insights. Google rates a Largest Contentful Paint above 4 seconds as poor. Mobile performance scored 63 out of 100 and the SEO score sat at 83.
The main menu listed eight items. Parent, curriculum and story pages all competed with the books for attention. The homepage opened with his name and a dense block of text, so a new visitor had to work to see what the books were for. There was also no online shop on the site itself.
Homer needed a faster, clearer website. He also needed the move to keep the search visibility his pages had already earned. That is the main risk in any SEO website migration, and on a site with 30+ pages a few missed URLs can cost months of rankings.