Replatforming an E-Commerce Website Without

Transcription

Replatforming
an E-Commerce
Website Without
Losing SEO Value
Page 1
Shout HQ Phone Number: 03 9866 8648
www.shoutwebstrategy.com.au
Replatforming an E-Commerce Website Without Losing SEO Value
Contents
Executive Summary.............................................................................................................................................................................. 03
Preliminary Considerations................................................................................................................................................................04
Four Primary SEO Concerns When Planning to Replatform..................................................................................................04
Techniques for Maintaining SEO During a Replatform............................................................................................................. 05
Maintaining Link Equity....................................................................................................................................................................... 05
Avoiding Errors....................................................................................................................................................................................... 05
Advanced Improvements.................................................................................................................................................................... 06
Case Study: Leveraging Product Database Optimisation - Bevilles.................................................................................... 07
After the Switch: What to Expect Post-Replatforming............................................................................................................ 08
Case Study: Identifying Issues After Replatforming – Hotels.com.au................................................................................. 09
Conclusion: The Complete SEO Checklist for Replatforming an E-Commerce Website............................................... 10
Page 2
Executive Summary
As more competition floods into e-commerce, the
stakes get higher. The race for competitive advantage
never ends. Continuous improvement is the mantra now
adopted by e-commerce professionals, dictating an
eternal hunger for innovation and adaptation.
One of the most important considerations for any
modern website is the management of brand equity
via search engine optimisation (SEO) and the resultant
search engine results page (SERP) rankings.
Another equally necessary element in maintaining an
e-commerce website revolves around when and how to
implement a website replatform. A replatform might be
called for in any number of situations, however every
online business is sure to require one at some point.
What many don’t take into account at this stage is how
a replatform can potentially affect the brand’s search
ranking values.
Whether an e-commerce brand’s SEO practices are
already at the highest level, or whether there is much
more optimisation required, a replatform procedure
represents a highly sensitive period, in which brand
equity can either be improved, maintained or damaged.
Shout! Web Strategy has amassed industryspecific expertise in helping brands to maintain
and improve SEO performance before, during and
post-replatforming. As experts in this field, Shout!
has produced this document in order to address all
the important stages of replatforming and the SEO
implications for each. Included also are two unique case
examples, each focusing on the various SEO concerns
for replatforming.
Page 3
Preliminary
Considerations
Businesses choose to change their web platform
for many different reasons. The methods by which
they achieve their goals will depend on the specific
technologies and systems involved, the talent and
resources available, as well as any constraints inherent
in their model.
For online retailers, replatforming most often occurs
when the business needs to scale up from a basic
shopping cart solution into more complex e-commerce
platforms, which they hope will provide further
scalability in the future.
Website owners often regard replatforming as an
opportunity to improve the design of their website from
a usability perspective, which it certainly is. What many
don’t realise is that it’s a perfect opportunity to also
improve the search performance of a website, resulting
in increased traffic, stronger conversions and a higher
return on investment.
Online retailers already know that SEO is important
to their business and they’ve been working on it for
a while. However, there are many cases where certain
aspects of SEO practices are overlooked, which need to
be addressed well before replatforming.
Four Primary
SEO Concerns
When Planning
to Replatform:
Timing
The first concern for any business prior to replatforming
is to seek out relevant advice well before any
development or implementation occurs. SEO should
be prioritised to the same level as web design, which
means web developers should be working closely with
SEO resources as early on as the wireframing stage of
design. This allows SEO concerns to be factored into
the general site architecture, which will eliminate the
possibility of certain errors occurring. See the Hotels.
com.au case study for insights into what can go wrong
when SEO isn’t factored into a replatform event.
Outsourcing
By the same token, be very wary of using existing
personnel for SEO planning and practices if they are
not already a dedicated SEO resource. Web developers
don’t always have the level of expertise required, and
even at a project management level, few e-commerce
professionals have the depth and scope of knowledge
to guarantee success in this area. Outsourcing this small
part of your business will potentially save it from a fatal
loss of search value.
Backlinks
Generally speaking, brand equity and website authority
is established through the creation of a solid link base.
If a website doesn’t have the correct level of relevant,
authoritative back-links directed to it, then its brand
equity is already compromised. Prior to replatforming,
a link base analysis should be undertaken, with a good
linking strategy developed and implemented where the
website is found wanting.
Keywords
Retailers are also frequently missing out on gaining
traffic on long-tailed keywords by focusing too much
on generic, highly competitive terms instead. This
may also be a constraint of the website’s design itself
– another good reason to consider SEO before the
design phase of a replatforming project. Are specific
product pages getting ranked, rather than categories?
They certainly should be, but often retailers miss
out on this highly qualified search traffic because
they aren’t optimising correctly. For information on
optimising product feeds to control page ranking
factors, turn to the Bevilles case study.
Planning a replatform can be extremely resource
intensive, which means the exercise can be all the more
costly if it isn’t planned correctly with SEO high in the
list of priorities right from the outset. The recovery of a
website that hasn’t taken these concerns into account
before relaunching is much more difficult than getting it
right from Day One.
In this sense, prevention, as always, is far better than a
cure.
Page 4
Techniques for
Maintaining SEO
During a Replatform
When moving from one content management
system (CMS) to another, the major concern for retail
operations is that several years’ worth of good SEO
practices can be lost in the blink of an eye.
The way that Google perceives a website before a
replatform can be completely different to its perception
after the new website goes live. Any number of errors
could cause Google to decide that the new website
should appear much lower in search rankings than it did
previously, and this is an extremely costly issue to have.
As long as SEO is planned for in advance of the
replatform, then there are several processes that can
be implemented throughout design and development
to ensure search value, and therefore brand equity, is
maintained after the new site is launched. This generally
involves working hard to maintain specific link equity
across the entire URL structure, as well as avoiding
critical errors like duplicate content and 404 issues.
For businesses that are able to come to grips with these
practices, further opportunities present themselves that
will allow a site to actually exceed its original search
value. The more optimisation that can occur at this
phase of replatforming, the more chance there will be
of actually increasing brand equity as a direct result.
Maintaining Link Equity
The term ‘link equity’ essentially refers to the value
of the interconnected structure of a website. A well
optimised website will already have a good URL
structure interlinking pages together, which should also
be supported by another layer of backlinks coming in
from other authoritative websites.
During the planning phase of replatforming, any
existing issues with these links should already be
resolved. These issues might include broken links and
even poorly optimised links, which aren’t attributed to
the ideal anchor text.
URL Structure and 301 Redirects
Moving into the replatform, the aim will be to ensure
this linking structure is translated correctly to the new
website and that Google understands to attribute
authority to the correct pages. Any change to the URL
structure of a website (which will occur during CMS
changes and usability redesigns) requires a redirecting
strategy as a matter of absolute necessity.
301 redirects allow the webmaster to connect the dots
when it comes to new URLs. This technique ensures
that the old pages redirect through to the new pages,
transferring the authority attributed to the original
page into the new one.
Avoiding Errors
For the most part, it is this process of redirecting traffic
flow correctly that forms the majority of maintaining
search value during such a sensitive transition.
In having said that, there are other errors that can
occur and are therefore worth paying close attention
to during development stages. Things like canonical
and 404 errors will pop up, particularly when content is
being generated dynamically.
Canonical Tags
Most online retailers will have examples of duplicate
content on their website. Essentially what this refers
to is any web page that appears in more than one URL
within the same domain. The thing is, Google doesn’t
like duplicate content at all. Every online business
should be aware of this concern, and counteract it with
the use of ‘canonical’ tags.
A canonical tag is a little like a 301 redirect, except it
doesn’t transfer authority from one page to another.
Instead, canonical tags direct Google to recognise only
one of the duplicate pages. In this sense, a retailer may
have four of the same page in its domain, but Google
will only recognise it as one, avoiding problems with
duplication.
Page 5
404 Errors
Advanced Improvements
Some retailers have a fantastic depth of inventory,
which is great if you think of a retailer as a physical
shop, but it can represent some very knotty issues
when trying to display these products in the online
store.
If the basics of SEO are already considered and you
are confident these considerations have been taken
on board, then it may well be worth going a little
bit further in order to truly maximise returns. These
considerations will generally include leveraging product
feeds in order to further optimise for long-tailed search
terms, while also optimising for paid search across
multiple channels.
When these retailers come to upload thousands of
stock keeping units (SKUs) onto their website with
dozens, if not hundreds, being updated on a weekly
basis, any attempt to manually upload the correct
information goes out the window. The only viable way
to do this is via some kind of automation process.
These days, CMS technology is getting better at
accepting real-time data feeds from inventory
management software, allowing retailers to update their
websites with products as soon as the stock is available.
The problem is that these solutions aren’t always
perfect, they aren’t always utilised correctly and the
problems they can cause aren’t often indentified when
they should be (immediately).
One major issue (as demonstrated in the example of
Hotels.com.au) is when products are dynamically driven
to the website without updating the live site map. The
site map takes the form of an .xml file, which is stored
on a website’s domain and serves to direct Google
when its bots arrive to crawl the site.
When pages appear on a website without appearing in
the .xml site map, Google is unable to properly navigate
those pages, causing what is termed a ‘404 error’. 404
errors are also perceived as a negative sign to Google,
and the more a website has, the poorer its ranking value
will be. To avoid this, regularly check to see that each
kind of page is referenced in the site map, particularly if
any pages are created automatically.
It’s important to note that large websites are bound
to accrue some errors, however this won’t necessarily
result in serious penalisation by search engines.
However, like in the case of Hotels.com.au, widespread,
systematic numbers of errors will have a significant
impact.
The Power of Product Feeds
When developing or designing an e-commerce website,
many developers forget the inherent SEO value of well
thought out content from the product-level up. The
information that is included alongside product uploads
is close to priceless – yet many brands overlook this
fact.
If product data is being dynamically driven to your
website, is it being optimised correctly? Everything,
from the creation of URLs to titles and beyond, needs
to contain the right keywords in the right volume in
order for them to begin ranking.
For Shout!, optimising product data feeds means
tailoring the content upload system to include a
specific set of rules, which governs how title tags and
meta descriptions are created. This process usually
includes developing dynamic footer templates, which
can be automatically populated with the correct terms,
ensuring that product uploads comply with the finest
SEO practices and that they occur with maximum
efficiency.
Having put a system like this in place, Shout! has helped
companies like Bevilles realise optimal SEO value for
products that are uploaded in volume.
When these processes are implemented correctly,
page ranking factors will become more evenly spread
throughout the website, with traffic arriving more
frequently on specific product pages. This has the
added bonus of increasing conversions, as users
are much less likely to bounce on a product page in
comparison to the category or home pages.
Multichannel Marketing
If a product feed is working correctly, then the data it
is generating can be used for things other than SEO.
While these channels may not directly relate to SEO
practices, they will help to increase traffic over time.
Page 6
Consider comparison shopping sites to push your
product data to and you will instantly have more
visibility on specific items. There’s also AdWords
campaigns to consider, and while these may take
some thought and resources to start working, the right
campaign can be just as rewarding as strong organic
traffic.
Most paid search isn’t done very well at a product
level, with many businesses again focused on shorttail, generic keywords. These general search terms
are fiercely competed, which means they are much
more expensive to buy (at two or three dollars) than
a product-specific term that might only cost 10 or
20 cents. Keep in mind that these long-tailed terms
actually convert better than generic keywords anyway.
In order to most easily handle this piece of the puzzle,
Shout! Web Strategy has developed technology that
dynamically generates advertisements at the product
level, so that retailers can optimise long-tail strategies
for every one of their SKUs.
Leveraging
Product Database
Optimisation Bevilles
Jewellery and accessories have found a surprising new
home in online retail, with the luxury items category
displaying tremendous growth in recent years. As a
household name in local jewellery sales, Bevilles was
one of the early retailers to move this category online
and experienced considerable success in doing so.
Shout! had already assisted Bevilles grow traffic to its
old website before a replatform was even planned. The
resulting growth - to the tune of 300 percent - had to be
safeguarded when it came time to execute the replatform.
Bevilles remains one of Australia’s biggest jewellery
companies, with 29 retail outlets across the country.
However, after having stuck with the same website
platform for eight years, the online side of its business
was in serious need of rejuvenation; any uplift in traffic
would be an added bonus.
Page 7
Shout! Web Strategy was called into Beville’s
replatforming venture at an early stage, which proved
to benefit both businesses, smoothing the transition
from a completely secure https-based site into a
predominantly http standard site. The brand already
garnered traffic on some generic keywords, so it was
integral to maintain this marketshare throughout the
transition.
Having been contracted during the wireframe phase of
design and development, we were able to advise how
changes to the site’s architecture, its functionality and
specific content might affect SEO, as well as making
recommendations to avoid potential errors.
Beyond the standard considerations with linking
structures, there was a real opportunity to improve
Bevilles’ long-tailed search traffic by optimising for
specific products as well as the more generic terms like
‘jewellery’, ‘jewellery online’ and ‘watches’.
As with many large retail operations, Bevilles’ depth of
inventory meant that many pages were being generated
dynamically. In order to derive any kind of search
value from these pages, we had to create an extremely
specific structure and methodology to define how these
pages would appear, including which keywords would
be used, how many would be used and how much text
should appear on the page in general.
Shout! then implemented a system of creating hardcoded pages from the footer of the site for specific
categories and keywords. These were essentially
text-rich ‘skin’ web pages that enabled us to begin
optimising Beville’s new site as it was being developed.
Then, when the website was relaunched on the new
platform, those pages begin ranking at the top of
search engines almost instantly.
The next phase was to create rules for the automation
of new product pages, which would really only come
into full effect after the website was relaunched. These
rules would cover the creation of title tags and meta
descriptions, so that even if thousands of SKUs were
uploaded at once, the correct keywords would appear
in the right place.
By following basic SEO practices, as well as innovating
with some higher-order processes, Shout! was not only
able to maintain Bevilles’ brand equity during a major
replatform, but actually increase their search visibility
by doing further optimisation at a product-level. In this
case, users searching for specific items are now clicking
directly through to Bevilles’ category and product
pages with a much higher chance of conversion than
before the replatform took place.
After the Switch:
What to Expect
Post-Replatforming
If an SEO strategy is sound, cohesive and implemented
at the right times throughout a replatform, then the
website in question can stand to benefit with rising
traffic levels once Google has finished indexing and
appraising its latest iteration.
However, even when best practices have been followed
to the letter, some ranking and traffic fluctuations are
expected in the first few weeks after launch. This is
simply because Google does take some time to digest
the new information that has been released on the web.
Businesses should expect a drop-off in rankings value
during this brief interlude, but they should bounce back
soon after. However, if rankings don’t revive after two or
three weeks, it’s time to start worrying that something
has gone wrong.
At this point, Google Webmasters can be used to try
and isolate any crawlability issues on the new site. It
may be that canonical rules were not applied correctly,
product feeds may still be generating 404 errors, or it
could be incorrectly applied 301 redirects.
These issues can be solved easily enough once they
have been identified; however it usually takes someone
with a keen eye for SEO practices to quickly isolate
them in the first place.
Identifying Issues
After Replatforming Hotels.com.au
When it comes to website replatforming and SEO,
it’s far better to plan and implement an SEO strategy
during the process, rather than trying to recover from
brand equity loss afterwards.
In the early planning and development stages of a
replatforming project, an experienced SEO expert can
put systems in place to reduce the likelihood of poor
SEO performance, following the migration process. For
those companies who call upon SEO expertise once the
website replatforming process is complete, the damage
is already done.
Page 8
Online travel group, Hotels.com.au was one company
that reached out to Shout! Web Strategy after already
having completed the replatforming process. By
that time, the company had already experienced a
significant drop in search traffic – a decrease in the
order of 75 percent.
The first step to recovering from such a large hit to
online brand equity meant isolating the issues that
caused the drop in traffic. Having little knowledge of
the planning, design and development of the Hotels.
com.au replatforming process, it was challenging for us
to immediately diagnose the issue.
Essentially, as with just about any unforeseen SEO
issue, our task first involved trawling through Google
Webmasters to piece together what had occurred
during the migration, before developing a plan to
rectify whatever went wrong.
In the case of Hotels.com.au, Shout! came to the project
well after replatforming decisions had been made and
executed. Because these changes were made without
SEO expertise, the platform itself had started to generate
problems for the company’s search value. The platform
was set up so that the website’s product feed could be
sent through from third party providers, however this
content wasn’t being dynamically updated on the .xml
sitemap. As can happen to any brand replatforming
without an SEO specialist on hand, Hotels.com.au’s web
developers weren’t aware of these implications, and so
the errors began to build up. From a user perspective this
is fine; the pages were being created, but from a search
engine perspective, many of these pages were completely
invisible.
The Hotels.com.au website had built up 180,000 pages
that were all generating 404 errors. Web crawlers
could not affect every crawl and cache the important
pages from the site, thereby causing massive ranking
repercussions. When this happens, the crawlers enter
the website and then leave again, taking with them little
more information to relate to Google other than an
error report.
Page 9
For any site like Hotels.com.au, with hundreds of
thousands of pages, crawlability can become a thorny
issue unless good SEO practices are upheld at all times.
These same issues are faced by any retailer that might
seek to dynamically drive content directly from their
inventory, so this example serves to show what a worstcase scenario may look like when replatforming.
Phase Two: Execution
Luckily, even at this stage a website’s SEO value can
be restored so long as steps are immediately taken to
solve whatever errors are occurring across the site.
Keep a close eye on potential errors due to the creation
of duplicate content or 404 errors. In particular, look
for problems to occur in the case of dynamically driven
content, which may not have been created with SEO in
mind.
Our task was then to recreate an accurate version of
the live sitemap, while also implementing processes
to ensure that the dynamically created pages were
updating this sitemap ongoing.
However, it is worth highlighting that the process for
recreating an accurate .xml sitemap is an extremely
tedious, painstaking process if it hasn’t been done
automatically. This again serves to demonstrate
the need for these SEO concerns to be taken into
consideration well before a replatform is implemented.
The Complete
SEO Checklist for
Replatforming an
E-Commerce Website
For a complete summary of SEO concerns to be aware
of throughout a replatforming procedure, Shout! Web
Strategy has produced the following checklist to ensure
you have all your bases covered. Remember: include
SEO as a priority very early on in the planning phase to
make the entire procedure as pain-free as possible.
This phase largely revolves around ensuring that any
changes to the original website’s URL structure are
implemented correctly throughout the replatform.
This includes applying correct 301 redirects where
necessary.
Consider possible improvements to both the SEO and
SEM facets of the brand’s e-commerce practices, as
this is the time to make any beneficial upgrades in this
area. Consider ways of creating SEO friendly rules for
the dynamic product feeds, such as the judicious use of
well-crafted footer templates.
Phase Three: Monitor
After a website replatform is complete, it is necessary
to closely monitor the performance of the site within
search engines for several weeks. At first, a dip in
rankings performance is to be expected, but this should
bounce back in the first two to three weeks.
If the website suffers damage to its search rankings
and fails to recover after this period, it is time to
start looking more closely at Google Analytics and
Webmaster in order to isolate any causal errors. These
errors must be rectified as soon as possible in order to
regain lost brand equity.
Phase One: Planning
Organisational concerns should be catered for early
on. Ensure that relevant experts are available for the
duration of the replatform and that these resources are
dedicated SEO specialists.
URL analysis should be undertaken during the planning
phase, with any errors or inherent flaws in the brand’s
SEO strategy identified and rectified where possible.
Complete keyword research for all relevant terms
to ensure targets can be set and met. Is the brand
performing where it should be? Good ranking factors
need to be maintained, whereas any improvements that
can be made need to be highlighted.
Page 10
Shout Web Strategy is a leading digital
marketing agency offering a full suite
of services including search engine
optimisation and marketing, social media
campaigns, email marketing, ecommerce
consulting and web analytics.
The web is the most powerful sales
channel in the world. Are you making
the most of your online opportunities?
Contact Shout now for a free consultation.
National Head Office
Melbourne
Level 2, 2 Darling St
South Yarra VIC 3141
(03) 9866 8648
Sydney
Suite 1308, 109 Pitt St
Sydney NSW 2000
(02) 8003 3070
Brisbane
320 Adelaide Street
Brisbane QLD 4000
(07) 3012 3673
shoutwebstrategy.com.au

Replatforming an E-Commerce Website Without

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