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 important 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.
While this case study focuses on a retail client, the methods outlined here are adaptable to various sectors, including sports and informational websites.
This adaptability underlines our approach’s versatility, ensuring that our SEO strategies are designed to meet diverse needs no matter the industry. This leads us into the initial stage of our process, the Magento SEO Audit, where we begin with thorough preparations to set the foundation for successful SEO enhancement.
Preparations: the Magento 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 comprehensive check before we could get started working on the optimization strategy.
Ensuring the migration did not negatively impact natural visibility or site traffic was important, given the potential revenue implications. This required a detailed understanding of the current SEO performance and traffic metrics for each page—a notable undertaking in itself.
This comprehensive assessment laid the groundwork for the detailed planning necessary for the Magento SEO audit.
As we delve into the next phase, we outline the detailed Steps in Preparations, providing a structured approach to safeguard and enhance site performance throughout the audit process.
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 multiple 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
After completing a Magento SEO case study, the critical phase of anticipation begins as we await search engine spiders to index the newly optimized pages.
This period is pivotal as it sets the stage for potential surges in organic traffic, which is important for all types of websites, from sports blogs to retail platforms. Each page’s snippets, created during the SEO process, are vital in attracting visitors and enhancing site visibility.
As these changes take effect, patience is required to see the fruits of detailed SEO labor—increased sales and traffic spikes on optimized pages. This waiting period, though often a test of patience, culminates in measurable shifts in site performance, leading us to examine the outcomes and insights from the impact of Magento SEO.
Outcomes and Insights: The Impact of Magento SEO
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.
