Case study: 77% Increase in Revenue by Implementing Technical SEO Best Practices

We were approached by an international eCommerce store that recently did a migration to a newer eCommerce platform, and, just a couple of months later, migrated more than 20 store views from .eu to .com domain.

3 weeks after the migration was done, Google was still indexing around 30k URLs ending in .eu. Due to a lack of SEO migration strategy, the website faced a decrease in organic traffic for the first month after migration by 42% compared to the previous year.

Technical SEO audit

Although on-page optimization is extremely important, in this case, we focused on a proper technical setup. We knew that overall the content was fully migrated from the old website so the reason for the decrease in rankings most likely must have been related to a poor technical SEO setup.

We performed an in-depth technical audit, focusing on issues related to international SEO. While running the audit, we reviewed and analyzed more than 120 elements related to technical SEO.

Overall, we identified 22 issues to be fixed and 9 possible improvements.

Main issues discovered

Over-indexation

Canonical tags were missing, faceted navigation was set to index, follow, and robots.txt wasn’t adjusted—all of it resulted in over-indexation. That lead to an SEO value decrease for each unique link.

Forced GEO IP redirect

Forcing GEO IP redirect was harmful to both search engine bots and users. Also, several store views were in English. Combine this with missing hreflangs and as a result, the search engine bots see a lot of duplicated content and can’t identify which store view to show for which country.

Internal errors

Various internal errors—404, 301 redirects, server errors—all led to poor user experience which also affected rankings.

Technical SEO improvements

scandiweb SEO team completely reworked the approach to international SEO by replacing forced IP redirects with a much friendlier and flexible approach for both users and search engine bots and implementation of hreflangs. Proper international SEO setup ensured that Google now displays the localized versions of the website in specific countries and regions which increased the CTR of search results.

We also implemented canonical tags, proper XML sitemaps, robots.txt, and meta robot tags. All the best SEO practices are applicable to basically any website. With the help of developers, we also developed and implemented a structured approach to indexation of faceted navigation to avoid indexing low-quality content, which is a common issue for eCommerce stores.

Results

As a result, we saw a 76.95% increase in revenue from organic traffic compared to the last year. The increase was achieved in 4 months.

Can’t reach for the stars if you have nothing to stand on! Get in touch with us and let’s do a technical SEO audit and tackle the most important improvement opportunities for your site to lay the valuable groundwork for an SEO-perfect store!

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