Magento SEO Case Study

Introduction

This is a case study of a worldwide business hiring me to oversee the SEO optimization of their ecommerce store on Magento. As a major retail brand with a sizable online presence, a smooth move with no organic traffic loss was vital to the client.

Because of the disturbance to your connection with search engines, each website update poses an SEO risk. The higher the size and complexity of the website, the greater the danger of organic ranking instability.

This Magento optimization was a fantastic success. We’ll go over some of the most significant points in this Magento SEO case study below, such as why it’s critical to understand the current state of SEO on the migrating site, why careful preparation of information architecture is nearly as important as active redirects, and why proper planning is critical.

By the end, you will be able to see how effective our team was at driving new traffic and revenue to the web page in question.

This case study is for a retail client, but we use similar processes to those found in this blog post when we work with sports sites, information sites, or sites in any of the other categories.

Preparations: the SEO Audit

We like to start with a straightforward SEO audit. Through years of experience with SEO audit management and the Magento platform, we have built up enough expert knowledge to adjust these procedures to the individual demands of each shop.

In general, SEO audits are performed to ensure that:

• The indexation of URL parameters has no effect on SEO value.
• There is no duplicate material on the site, such as duplicate pages.
• There is no vital metadata missing.

Before we begin, our clients are asked to provide access to Google and Bing webmaster tools, as well as the live website’s ftp and backend access credentials.

Without access to this data, it would be hard to conduct a thorough website audit and identify serious concerns. The best approach is to do this at the beginning of the process, and we ensure that we prepare all of our customers’ websites with an audit before we start the migration process.

In the case of this particular case study, the brand was huge enough that we needed to perform an extensive check before we could get started working on the optimization strategy.

We had to ensure that the migration could be performed without causing a drop in natural visibility or any reduction in visitors to the site, as this could have a serious impact on revenue.

We needed to know the current SEO and traffic status of every page on the site – a major survey project in its own right!

Step 1: Information Architecture Planning

It was clear from the very beginning of the process that information architecture would be critical to the migration’s success.

It is reasonable to concentrate on redirects, but if your new site’s information architecture is bad or drastically different from your previous site, the impact of your high-quality redirects will be diminished.

If your redirects are sending your customers to useless URLs like product pages that do not exist, they are not going to be any help for traffic, no matter how well-managed they are!

Step 2: Data Analysis

According to keyword data analysis, the objective of most Google searches was structured around version types of certain commercial products, such as year of manufacturing and item model.

When users looked for any version of commercial products in this category, the client needed to be visible at the top of the rankings for relevant keywords.

This meant that we had to make sure that each version had landing pages that were fully crawlable and indexable.

However, we did not intend to develop a landing page for every possible combination of these numerous product variations because it would clog the site with massive volumes of near-identical material.

There would be no point in having so many pages created in order to attract only a little more revenue. There had to be a more elegant way of dealing with this problem that could provide improvement with more focus.

We designed an information architecture based on keyword research data and user journey analysis. The website structure included landing pages for the most important product combinations in the category.

We also needed to design an internal co-linking structure that would allow users to go to any of these sites and URLs in a logical and seamless manner.

Step 3: Redirects

As with any website transfer, redirects were of vital importance to the project’s eventual results. However, this was a massive site with constant content creation.

That meant many thousands of constantly changing product and category pages where things were routinely launched, updated, or withdrawn. All of these made URL redirection mapping an unusually complex part of the SEO project.

Remember that the primary reason for a reduction in rankings following a transfer is the interruption created by moving to a new website.

Google must follow your redirection, crawl your new sites, and reprocess all ranking signals in order to determine where your new URLs should rank.

We used a range of SEO tools to track and manage backlinks and redirecting, ensuring that we did not miss any in the transfer. Once the main transfer was complete, staying on top of new content creation for SEO was much easier.

Step 4: Waiting

Once a Magento SEO case study project like this is complete, the final step is to wait for the search engines spiders to crawl the new website pages.

Once the bots have done their job, a huge amount of change in organic traffic can be seen. But in order to get to that point, you have to wait and see if the SEO team have finished their job fully.

The spiders need to index the pages and create snippets to entice customers – more important for sports blog websites than retail sites, but still an important driver of revenue.

No matter what categories your site falls into, the final step of any Magento migration is to wait for the traffic to come.

Sales will start to rise on the pages that have seen Magento SEO optimization, but it can take a while for the traffic to really spike.

The End Result

While it takes a while from the completion date of any migration project before any results are visible, this particular client project Magento SEO case study, was one we started working on long enough ago that the results of the migration and optimization strategy our team used are plain.

The client’s sales have continued to be strong, with improved positioning in the rankings pages for their chosen keywords.

Every page of the site used in this Magento SEO case study, including category pages and products, saw a significant rise in organic traffic once our SEO team was finished.