Festival website for fayatak: built SEO-first and live before the event

Starting point

fayatak is a youth culture festival in Berlin-Pankow. Before the project, the existing website sat on an old domain (klimatak.de) that was neither technically nor strategically aligned with the new festival: no structured event markup, a site architecture that was hard for search engines to parse, and a domain name that no longer matched the brand. For a festival with a fixed date, visibility is time-critical – if you can’t be found shortly before the event, you lose reach exactly when it matters.

Brief

A new website that fits the fayatak brand, goes live before the festival, and is built for search from the start – rather than bolting on SEO afterwards. Specifically: migration to the new domain without losing existing visibility, a structure that helps search engines understand the festival as an event, and a fast, lean, maintainable foundation – delivered on a small budget (pro bono project).

Approach

The site was built as a custom WordPress child theme – lean, without page-builder overhead, with full control over markup and performance. SEO wasn’t a separate step at the end, but part of every decision:

• Event schema (structured data): The festival was marked up with event schema so search engines recognise the date, location, and event as such – a prerequisite for event rich results in search.
• Clean, crawlable structure: Clear page hierarchy, meaningful headings, semantic HTML – also with AI answer formats in mind.
• Performance by default: A YouTube facade loads videos only on click, instead of slowing the page down with third-party scripts – better for load times and privacy.
• Contact flow: Forms via Contact Form 7, including spam protection.
• Domain migration: Clean move from klimatak.de to fayatak.de with 301 redirects, so existing link signals and rankings are preserved rather than lost.
• Monitoring: Google Search Console set up to track indexing and visibility from launch and adjust as needed.

Most of the build was done with Claude Code and browser automation via the Claude-in-Chrome integration – a workflow that makes professional execution possible even on a small budget.

Result

Despite the very tight timeline, the site went live before the festival – on the new brand domain, technically clean, and with event markup. The primary goal here wasn’t short-term traffic (demand peaks around the festival date), but a solid foundation that will carry over to next year’s edition.

In the first ten or so days after launch – still before the festival – Google Search Console already showed that the foundation works:

• Fast indexing: All core pages (homepage, lineup, “Who we are”, “Join us”) were indexed within days and appeared in search.
• Brand secured: For the brand name “fayatak”, the site ranks at an average position of around 1.9 – right at the top of page 1.
• Migration works: Searches for the old brand (“klima tak”) already return the new domain – the redirect from klimatak.de is working as planned.
• Early non-brand visibility: Descriptive searches like “pankow festival” or “klimafestival berlin” are already showing up – the basis for organic discovery is in place.
• Mobile-first confirmed: Around 70% of visits came from mobile devices – directly validating the deliberately lean, fast build approach.

The absolute numbers are naturally small in this window – the site had only been live for a few days and the festival was still ahead. What matters is that the technical and structural foundation has been in place from day one: it doesn’t expire after the event but can be carried forward and expanded for the next festival edition.

Tools used

WordPress (custom child theme) · Event schema (JSON-LD) · Contact Form 7 with spam protection · YouTube facade · 301 redirects · Google Search Console · Claude Code with Claude-in-Chrome browser automation