Replatforming an E-Commerce Website Without Losing SEO Value

Transcription

1 Replatforming an E-Commerce Website Without Losing SEO Value Page 1

2 Contents Executive Summary Preliminary Considerations...04 Four Primary SEO Concerns When Planning to Replatform...04 Techniques for Maintaining SEO During a Replatform Maintaining Link Equity Avoiding Errors Advanced Improvements...06 Case Study: Leveraging Product Database Optimisation - Bevilles 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 Page 2

3 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

4 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

5 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

6 404 Errors 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. 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. Advanced Improvements 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. 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

7 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

8 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

9 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

10 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. 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. 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. Phase Two: Execution 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. 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. 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

11 Shout Web Strategy is a leading digital marketing agency offering a full suite of services including search engine optimisation and marketing, social media campaigns, 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) Sydney Suite 1308, 109 Pitt St Sydney NSW 2000 (02) Brisbane 320 Adelaide Street Brisbane QLD 4000 (07) shoutwebstrategy.com.au