SEO Guide for Complex eCommerce Store Migration

Are you planning to upgrade your eCommerce platform? The eCommerce platform migration is not an easy job as it involves complex infrastructure, user databases, running marketing efforts, etc.  If it doesn’t execute accurately, the whole process brings a lot that can go wrong.

There can be multiple common migration issues that the merchant can face when moving the website to new technology. These issues can be a sudden drop in visibility, traffic, or sales. Any blunder can be a massive business loss, and indeed this kind of mistake is not an option.

In this article, we have covered the essentials SEO elements that are important to avoid SEO loss.

We are picking different scenario of upgrading/changing your store

1. Change in core technology. Ex: Moving a website from WordPress to Magento.

• The current e-commerce platform is not able to support the enormous amount of traffic or business need.

2. Upgrade existing technology: upgrading Magento 1 to 2, for instance;

• The existing version is outdated and doesn’t support advanced technologies.
• Security threat of using the older version.

3. Complete rebranding/revamping stores with complete change or no changes at all on the e-commerce platform itself (i.e. moving away from WordPress).

• The technology can be changed or maybe the existing one.
• The technology also changes along with the UI/UX. Ex: Myresortnetwork. This website was in ASP and moved to Code Ignitor.

In any of the above cases, your SEO may impact hardly. So it is crucial to align your SEO effort initially.

The Execution plan for successful Migration Process

1. All stakeholders should be on the same page

• The project manager, UI/UX expert, Developer, and SEO team need to involve in every phase of the project.
• The UI/UX, client-side coding, and server-side coding should be as per the SEO point of view.

2. The SEO team should involve at the initial stage of the planning.

• The SEO team should involve the initial stage of the project.
• The new UI/UX should be SEO-friendly. It should have enough space to add content, h1 tags, minimal JavaScript, etc.
• The SEO team closely monitors the whole progress and shares the SEO input.

3. The excellent execution plan, Timeline, and QA process

• The execution plan should be well researched and approved by the stakeholders.
• Each team should work together to meet the Timeline.

Essential SEO factors that need to be focused on while working on the new technology.

What should your SEO approach migrate the website without loss of organic traffic, visibility, and sales?

The SEO approach should be divided into two phases.

Prelaunch SEO Checklist

• SEO Benchmark of the below SEO matrices
  1. Keywords Ranking
  2. Organic traffic
  3. Index Page
  4. Page load speed

• Complete SEO Audit
  1. Broken links
  2. HTML text ratio
  3. Canonical tags implementation
  4. Indexing and Crawling

• URL Mapping from OLD to New URLs
• Product/Content Migration on the new website.
• Meta Titles, Descriptions, H1 Tag, H2 Tag, etc., of the entire website.
• Search Console and Google Analytics Setup

Post Launch SEO Checklist

• Complete SEO audit of the new website.
• SEO Mobile and Desktop version test.
• Bugs fixes.
• Regenerate Sitemap.xml
• Broken links check.
• Crawling and Indexing.
• 301 redirection test.
• Audit of Keywords ranking.
• Audit of website traffic.
• Tracking and Monitoring.

How ResultFirst helps one of its clients to migrate the website from ASP to CI without losing the traffic and ranking.

Myresortnetwork was looking for an agency that can help them in revamping the complete website. ResultFirst found that the current technology was outdated, so it was suggested to change the technology and the UI/UX. Below is how we helped them to achieve their objective.

Objective

• A completely new website with the best UI/UX experience
• SEO shouldn’t be hampered.

Challenges:

• The website was developed in outdated technology.
• Big database
• The website had a strong SEO background, i.e., ranking, traffic, and index pages, etc.
• There are hundreds of orphaned pages that were not interlinked from other pages.
• Limited Timeline to complete the website

Solutions

• ResultFirst proposed to develop a new website in a framework rather than any CMS. They went with Code Ignitor.
• After analyzing the existing database and limited timeframe, we decided to go with the current database with the new technology.
• Did the detailed SEO audit before starting the development work. We focused on below SEO matrices:
  1. Total Number of Indexed Pages.
  2. Backlinks, Referring domains, DA, and PA.
  3. Organic Traffic.
  4. Top performing keywords.
  5. The page load speed on Mobile and Desktop.
  6. Technical audit on search console and google analytics.
  7. Crawling and Indexing test.

Benchmark of the above SEO matrices.

SEO Best Practices that ResultFirst followed for Myresortnetwork.com

UI/UX

• Involved SEO team while working on the UI/UX.
• Used the minimum JavaScript and external libraries.
• Avoid unnecessary HTTP requests.
• Compressed images.
• Followed the design that allows adding enough content to the website.
• W3C validated HTML5 coding.
• Excellent coding that is easy to crawl by the search engines.
• Excellent internal inking to reach every essential page of the website.

URL Structure

• Each page has a unique and descriptive URL
• Avoided usage of sessions, unique character, etc. in the URL
• Followed the uniformity in the URL. None of them are case-sensitive.
• Used the hyphen (-) as a word separator, avoided the underscore (_)
• Used ASCII characters
• We tried to maintain the same URL for at least top-performing pages.

Tech SEO

• Made sure relevant content is accessible
• Avoided Client-Side redirects such as HTML or JavaScript redirection.
• Speed, speed, speed…
• Followed tech SEO best practices

301 URL Mapping

• Compiled list of all the URLs
• Automated the URL mapping as the number of pages was in thousands.
• No redirects chain
• No redirect loops

Results

• The website was launched in six months, with no loss of organic traffic and rankings.
• Excellent page load speed.

The highlighted traffic graph is after the launching of the new website. The traffic is consistent since the launch of the website.

Takeaway

In the era of changing web technologies and user behavior you can’t rely on the same technology and UI/UX for longtime. Although the whole ecommerce migration process is a complex exercise however we plan it correctly, It is executed without any SEO loss. You are planning to migrate your ecommerce technology, feel free to connect with ResultFirst.