Overview
Increased YoY organic traffic
Challenge
Our client went through a site redesign and migrated to a new CMS, in which they changed their URLs and information architecture. Post-migration, they saw a 26% decline in traffic, and gap in year-over-year performance the month after launch.
During the initial technical SEO audit, Seer found the following technical issues:
- 163,198 URLs not properly redirected
- 90k 404 pages from URLs that existed and were missed in the redirect map, or directories that were created but never contained content
- Excessive URL parameters created and indexed
- Mass amounts of duplicate content
- Missing/mismatched canonical tagging
Seer's goal was to work with our client to properly redirect URLs, block parameterized URLs, and update canonical tags site wide.
Approach
Identify and fix major issues through regular Technical SEO audits/check-ups, and log file analyses.
Execution
- Crawled staging site and identified URLs that were not properly redirected and presented new redirect map to client for implementation
- Reduced 404 errors by 94% (90k down to 5k) by observing traffic and backlinks to determine valuable URLs that should be properly redirected
- Use log file data to observe wasted crawl budget and blocked excessive URL parameters
- Presented solutions to fix faceted navigation and consolidated duplicate content via 301 redirects
- Identified duplicate folders throughout the site and 301 redirected URLs and implemented 410s for URLs containing little to no value
- Updated canonical tags site wide to ensure proper URLs were being canonicalized and indexed
Results
By rectifying these website migration issues and continuing to provide regular audits and analyses, our client has seen increases in organic traffic, organic transactions and YoY organic revenue.
