Sortovi Semena: Online store migration with 152% order growth

We started with Crawl on the website in a production environment before the migration. The goal was to record all data about it: urls, technical errors, warnings and remarks, so that we can prevent developers from migrating the described measures, which qualify as SEO negatives.

We arranged a preliminary meeting with the developer of the website so that we could get acquainted with the technology they will use for the migration. They also presented documentation for the new platform for which they will perform the migration, namely Magento.

After the Crawling process and after the meeting with the developers, we were able to systematize, classify and distribute correctly all errors, warnings and recommendations. After this process, we prepared in a convenient format all the data for inclusion in the Terms of Reference to the developers.

After we were introduced to the demo environment of the website called stage for short, we started an analysis of it to check whether there are no errors in Technical SEO on it. In this case, we had to find additional solutions for new errors, which are classified as “normal” based on such a migration. The identified errors were collected in a separate document for the purpose of “independence” of data and a cleaner work environment.

This step was necessary due to the lack of equivalence of some elements between the two platforms, the most critical were:

• URL hierarchy of categories
• Product hierarchy URL
• Visualization of “header” and “footer” menus

This necessitated the planning of redirect logic to maintain the purity of .htaccess, which could lead to unforeseen and or even predicted problems with the speed of loading and executing redirects.

After the comparative analysis, we collected all the errors from Stage and Production and prepared them for presentation in the Terms of Reference (Terms of Reference). Then we presented to the developer and the client, and this is always necessary because:

• The client makes the decisions
• The developer answers the questions: “When” and “Is it possible”
• Different integration methods and monitoring methods are discussed

This monitoring is extremely important and at the insistence of the developers we had to do it in their task management system (this is 99% of the cases normally and predictably). The developer was able to implement the changes that were imposed in the Terms of Reference in a timely manner without delay, which contributed to the results described below. This is the chronology of some of the tasks:

• URL hierarchy of categories
• Render analysis
• Crawl budget analysis
• Server Log Files Analysis
• GSC analysis
• GA analysis / SEO related
• 4XX status pages
• Pages with status 5XX
• On-page SEO * / Robots.txt *
• XML Sitemap
• HTML Sitemap
• RSS / FEED
• Non www / and with www
• HTTP / HTTPS Alerts
  HTTP to HTTPS Migration Guide
• Pages with rel = ”canonical”
• Pages with multiple canonical URLs
• Dofollow outbound links
• HTML / CSS validators
• Frames pages
• Check for very large pages
• Check for SEO Friendly URLs

•  
• Dynamic URLs
• Very long URLs
• Product-level redirects 301
• Product-level redirects 302
• Category 301 redirects
• Category 302 redirects
• Information page level redirects 301
• Information page level redirects 302
• Broken links
• Broken photos
• Missing alt text on photos
• Missing Title Tag
• Duplicate titles
• Very long titles
• Missing meta descriptions
• Duplicate meta descriptions
• H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6, A, B tags
• AMP
• Structure Data Markup
  Structure Data Markup Guide
• Loading Speed ​​
  Web Load Speed ​​Optimization Guide

After the migration of a website, a decrease in organic traffic between 5% and 20% is expected and accepted as a good result, but in this case the result is more than excellent, because we did not allow a decrease in organic traffic, but on the contrary – growth:

• 28.75% growth in Users
• 27.76% growth of New Users
• 37.31% Sessions growth

Definitely every online store, and not only has one main goal to sell more. In this case, we were able to improve this parameter for the store as follows:

• 83.63% Conversion Rate Growth
• 152.15% Conversion Rate Growth
• From 3,751 sales to 9,458

It is important for every SEO specialist to track the data from the Google Search Console (GSC), and we have prepared this for you:

We managed to increase the number of ranked phrases in google.bg in the top 3, top 4-10, top 11-20. We’ve also expanded the visibility and volume of keywords and phrases.