Stopping a board-approved migration was the biggest win of the job.

01

The situation

I arrived at the BBC in May 2017 to find a migration already signed off at board level. An external consultancy had recommended consolidating bbc.co.uk onto bbc.com, and the recommendation was built on flawed data. I could see that as soon as I looked at it properly.

The thing nobody outside the detail had clocked was that bbc.com and bbc.co.uk weren't two versions of the same site. bbc.com/news and bbc.co.uk/news looked similar on the surface, but underneath they were different products, built differently, serving different audiences. Consolidating them wasn't a domain change. It was force-merging two different websites into one, and there was no realistic SEO upside to doing that - only mass duplication, serious technical problems, and traffic loss both in the UK and internationally.

02

What we did

I had to build the case and take it to some very senior people at the BBC - well above where a technical SEO recommendation usually lands. That's a different job to running an audit. It's telling an organisation that the thing it has already agreed to do is wrong, and proving it.

I laid out three things plainly. One, the technical reality: two different websites would end up merged, with duplication neither codebase was built to handle. Two, the traffic reality: bbc.co.uk carried years of UK-specific ranking signal that wasn't going to transfer just because a URL changed - Google treats .com as internationally oriented, and that distinction matters at this scale. Three, the business reality: the tech-stack simplification that was actually motivating the whole programme didn't need the front-end domains to change at all. It could be done underneath, without touching bbc.co.uk or bbc.com as products.

The migration the board had approved would have merged two different websites into one. It wouldn't have simplified anything.

03

The results

I stopped a programme with board-level momentum behind it. My own estimate at the time, and I want to be clear this is an estimate rather than a measured outcome because the migration never went ahead, was a realistic downside of at least 10% to BBC's overall organic traffic. That risk wasn't spread evenly - the biggest, most valuable news properties would have taken the worst of it through cannibalisation, and across the organisation as a whole that means millions of clicks, not a rounding error.

The tech-stack simplification that motivated the programme happened anyway, achieved without touching the front-end domains. bbc.co.uk and bbc.com are still separate products today, in 2026, which is the clearest evidence that the original case for merging them was never really an SEO case at all.

04

The takeaway

Most case studies are about something that got built or fixed. This one's about something that didn't happen. Stopping a migration that already has board sign-off isn't a technical fix, it's a political one, and it only works if you can put a number on the risk and explain it to people who don't think in these terms every day.

That's the real work inside an organisation that isn't SEO-native. It's not just knowing what's wrong. It's making the case land with people who've already agreed to the opposite. Rigour, stakeholder education and a properly quantified risk beat momentum, and this is what that looks like in practice.