Red Band UK
Sustaining Digital Presence With An SEO Migration Done Right
Summary
Red Band UK is a multi-award-winning UK manufacturer, stockist and supplier of a wide range of quality construction, forest, garden and landscaping products based in Leicestershire. They wanted support performing a platform migration (replatforming) from Magento to WordPress.
Autify Digital helped them successfully migrate their website whilst maintaining keyword rankings, visibility, and organic search traffic.
Both the site migration and new website design were positively received by search engines and users, which lead to an improvement in organic search traffic, sales, and revenue following the migration.
SEO 
ecommerce SEO 
website migration 
26.72%
Overall traffic increased in 2 months
24.78%
Organic traffic increased in 2 months
36.69%
Total revenue increased in 2 months
The Challenge
Like many large ecommerce websites, managing the sheer volume of pages during a website migration without losing organic rankings and traffic was a challenge for the Red Band UK team. They didn’t have an in-house SEO specialist with an extensive history of successfully performing website migrations.
The client knew this, which is why they wanted to utilise our SEO expertise, experience, and guidance to ensure an easy migration from Magento to WordPress.
The Strategy
For this migration, we handled both the old and new website covering all the steps in our SEO migration checklist that were important for a successful migration, which involved:
- Full audit of the old and new staging website to ensure all the technical and on-page issues were recorded and appropriately addressed.
- Reviewing the XML sitemap and robots.txt file to ensure the crawling and indexing of the new pages.
- URL mapping and 301 redirects to make sure certain users and search engines are automatically directed to the correct pages on your new site when they try to access old URLs.
- Implementation and testing of 301 redirects to confirm the correct functionality.
- Launch new website (migration).
- Post migration checks to fix any technical issues, pages not migrated correctly, and incorrect directives in the robots.txt file.
Strategy Implementation
To ensure we could achieve all our goals, we applied the tactics below.
- Prioritised all the URLs with high traffic, high-value backlinks, and high conversion rates using Google Search Console (GSC) and Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
- Benchmarked current SEO performance to help measure the success of the migration
- Crawled both the old and new site to perform a technical SEO audit and create the 301 map
- Created new disallow rules for the robots.txt file on the new website
- Blog post audit to keep high-quality URLs with traffic and backlinks whilst removing and redirecting low-quality pages with minimal traffic and backlinks
- Created a 301 map that included over 1500 redirections (including 404 and 500 pages from GSC)
- Implemented 301 map on new site in test environment and tested them before going live
- We launched the new website
- Conducted post-launch website crawl using Screaming Frog to identify any technical SEO issues and test the 301 map again
- Ensured the new sitemap was correct and submitted it to Google Search Console
- Ensured the robot.txt file was correct and updated with the new directives
- Monitored website organic traffic and rankings
Results
16%
Google CTR increased in 2 months
15%
Google clicks increased in 2 months
2%
Google impressions increased in 2 months
- Overall traffic increased by 26.72% in 2 months
- Organic traffic increased by 24.78% in 2 months
- Google clicks increased by 15% in 2 months
- Google impressions improved by 2% in 2 months
- Google CTR increased by 16% in 2 months
- Google average position improved by 1% in 2 months
- Total revenue increased by 36.69% in 2 months
Given the traffic and revenue following the new website design, functionality, and migration, alongside how happy the client was with the communication, implementation, and expertise, we can confidently say that this Ecommerce Website SEO Migration was a success.
Benefits
- Increased the organic visibility of the website in search engines
- Increased the organic traffic of the website from search engines
- Increased audience reach
- Increased website conversions and total revenue
Testimonial
“We started working with Autify early 2024, they helped us migrate all our SEO across to our new website. The team at Autify are extremely efficient and knowledgeable, the entire experience was a pleasant one with daily updates. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them to anyone.”
● Chris White
Digital and E-commerce Manager
