How Cherry Bekaert Reimagined Its Digital Experience and Broke the Post-Launch Traffic Myth

When Cherry Bekaert flipped the switch on its redesigned website last year, the marketing team braced for the industry-standard dip in traffic that follows most major launches. Instead, the opposite happened: traffic increased, web leads climbed, and search visibility strengthened almost immediately.

For a Top 20 accounting, advisory and tax firm with a national footprint, that outcome wasn’t a lucky break. It was the result of a disciplined, multi-year digital transformation led by Chief Marketing Officer Kathryn DeLia — and a marketing team working with the mindset of product managers rather than project coordinators.

“We weren’t trying to simply refresh the look and feel,” DeLia says. “We needed to modernize the entire digital experience.”

That modernization began with rebuilding the foundation. Cherry Bekaert’s previous platform had become restrictive — difficult to govern, too rigid for multi-site management, and unable to support the personalization and data-driven engagement models the firm needed. Optimizely’s Digital Experience Platform became the backbone of a new vision: a site that could adapt and scale as buyer expectations and technologies evolve.

The result is an award-winning website — visually strong, but more importantly, operationally advanced. Optimizely’s DXP delivered a secure, scalable CMS, integrated analytics, an AI agent, more efficient governance, and a digital environment built for personalization and experimentation. It allowed the firm to move faster, maintain site health, and execute updates with precision. In many ways, the quiet operational gains have powered the visible success.

A major contributor to that success was moving SEO upstream. Rather than treating search optimization as a post-launch cleanup, DeLia’s team built every page around search intent. The firm strengthened its organic foundation through better architecture, more intentional content planning, and tighter alignment with how buyers actually search.

But the team also leaned into two emerging areas shaping the future of digital discovery.

GEO optimization recognized that many accounting buyers start locally — not with “tax advisory,” but “tax advisory near me.” Location pages and Google Business Profiles were upgraded to better capture those regional intent signals.

The most forward-looking shift was Answer Engine Optimization. As AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude influence how prospects discover and evaluate firms, Cherry Bekaert restructured content to ensure machines could understand and elevate it. Schema markup, FAQs, and concise explainer blocks became standard. The payoff came quickly: ChatGPT is now the firm’s number one referring traffic domain, with other AI tools appearing prominently in the top tier.

“It tells us the buyer journey is changing fast,” DeLia says. “People aren’t just Googling. They’re asking AI assistants for recommendations. If you’re not in the AI conversation, you’re not in the buyer’s consideration set.”

This hybrid landscape, where search engines and answer engines overlap, rewards firms that prioritize clarity, metadata, and authority.

Another of Cherry Bekaert’s standout achievements was avoiding the post-launch traffic cliff. Most organizations experience a 15- to 20-percent dip in organic visibility after releasing a new website. Cherry Bekaert avoided that drop by treating migration as a risk-managed process rather than a design event. Core architecture was preserved. Redirects were mapped meticulously. The schema was carried over. Monitoring tools were live before launch. Instead of a decline, the firm saw double-digit increases in both sessions and inbound leads.

DeLia is quick to credit her marketing team for that result. She emphasizes their discipline, attention to detail, cross-functional collaboration, and willingness to work in phases. “Their hard work shows in every part of this,” she says. “This was a team effort at every step.”

The new site represents just the beginning of the firm’s digital roadmap. Cherry Bekaert is now entering the next phases of its multi-year rollout, focused on:

• Intent-based personalization that adapts content by industry, role, and service need
• Expanded AEO practices as answer engines evolve
• Improved local journeys to support regional demand generation
• Cross-platform data integration for stronger attribution
• Experimentation and testing using Optimizely’s native tools

“It’s about evolving from a static site to a dynamic experience that adapts to each visitor,” DeLia says. “We’re building a digital ecosystem, not just a website.”

Her advice for other accounting marketing leaders is grounded in experience: think like a product manager, not a project manager. Build the foundation first — platform, governance, security. Move SEO into planning, not cleanup. Conduct a content audit early. Instrument the site before launch. Keep modules simple and minimize customizations. And, most importantly, phase the rollout so the team can learn and iterate.

“Above all,” she adds, “treat the site as a living system. It should continuously earn trust, adapt to buyer intent, and improve over time.”

Cherry Bekaert’s experience signals something larger happening across accounting marketing. Buyer behavior is shifting toward AI-assisted discovery. Content needs to be structured, governed, and delivered more intelligently. And firms that treat digital as a continuously evolving product — not a one-time project — will be the ones that get found first and trusted fastest.

Cherry Bekaert is already showing what that future looks like.