Why SEO is important when migrating to a new platform

Geir Halvorsen

Senior SEO Specialist

Earlier this autumn we were contacted by an e-commerce merchant who had launched a new site a few months earlier. After the launch, they had lost both rankings and organic traffic and needed help. In this article we compare that case with one of our own projects, where SEO was part of the work from the very start of the project.

Organic traffic without SEO work

We can call them E-commerce Merchant A — the ones who reached out to us. We started investigating what had happened and noted that their previous development partner had failed to carry out the important preparatory SEO work during the development of the new solution. By also not following standardised SEO recommendations, the launch unfortunately resulted in their organic ranking on Google quickly beginning to drop. The website launched at the beginning of May and just one week later we can see that the organic traffic to the site dips by almost 30%.

The website's organic ranking

When we look at their organic ranking (using the Semrush tool) we see similar patterns there. The ranking dips in May, recovers slightly, but then dips again and stabilises at the lower level.

The main reason their organic ranking dropped was that they changed their page structure and URL structure without preparing 301 redirects to explain to search engines that a previous URL has changed to something else. After the launch, many URLs were therefore generating 404 status codes (Page not found). This creates a poor experience for visitors and, above all, is devastating for rankings in search engines.

Google typically suggests there is a window of up to six months where it is possible to correct this after the fact, so it doesn't have to be "too late" — although it is of course always better to do this work in advance.

Our Growth Team has now carried out a so-called Growth Audit for this client, which has resulted in a plan for further work with a strong focus on both SEO and UX.

What happens when you focus on SEO from the start?

We call the next client E-commerce Merchant B, where we have been a full-service partner for design, technology and SEO since the beginning of the project. Here we can see what the result looks like when SEO is included as an integral part of the entire project. Some points that were particularly important to us were the following:

• Conducting a keyword analysis to identify potential and competitive advantages
• Creating a page structure that influences both organic visibility and navigation in the menu (UX)
• Optimising product page metadata already at the point of product import
• Ensuring that all old URLs are redirected with 301 redirects to new URLs
• Thorough testing before and after launch
• Careful follow-up and identification of pages generating 404 messages

Organic traffic to the website after launch

We launched the site at the beginning of November, which the client took the opportunity to promote across various channels. This creates curiosity that is also reflected in the organic traffic — visible in the first peak we see there. This is followed by Black Week, which creates the second peak we see in the graph. The traffic that follows after this is the new normal traffic to the website as a result of an increase in organic ranking. When we compare with the client's previous year, we see a clear increase in organic traffic of almost 70% after launch.

Organic ranking after launch

Here we see the same site and how their organic ranking on Google was affected after launch (figures taken from Semrush). We see a clear rise in November that continues to grow even through December.

Conclusions and recommendations

As paid advertising costs more and more, the value of organic traffic also becomes increasingly higher. Organic traffic also has a cost, but with the difference that it costs in time rather than per click. This also means it is permanent in a completely different way than paid advertising.

We recommend all our clients to have an SEO strategy that takes advantage of the technical platform being used, regardless of whether it is us or an external partner who is responsible for the SEO work.

A platform migration is a high-risk activity from an SEO perspective and therefore needs to be taken seriously. This means that someone needs to be responsible for SEO during the migration and ensure that the result turns out like E-commerce Merchant B and not E-commerce Merchant A in our examples.

If you would like to talk to us about this, you are very welcome to get in touch!