Considering an ecommerce replatform? Ignoring your site’s current SEO is a way to lose your ROI, and potentially, your J.O.B.

Imagine this situation at to your local favorite fictional brick and mortar sports equipment store, called Rick’s.

You have been a fan of Rick’s since they were a small shop. Now their store is too small to hold the demand. They have been so successful that they moved their digs to an anchor store at a new state of the art shopping mall in the heart of downtown.

However, at the grand opening only a small trickle of people show up, most stop in browse and leave without purchase.  To add insult to injury, Pro Shops down the street is piling in customers looking for new fitness gear, stealing Rick’s would-be customers.
After a few painfully confused looks from management they realize that they never advertised the new store opening, or let their customers know that they were moving. Rick’s is now left with tumbling revenue, unsold merchandise, staff cuts, and negative profits. Their loyal customers that were able to find the store so easily before were peeved to see an empty parking lot at the old store and vowed never to return.

This sounds like a far-fetched situation to happen on Main Street, but it happens all too frequently in the Ecommerce space. As you may have guessed, the new shiny store downtown represents a site redesign and replatform. The customers, mainly those that found the site via search engines, are now finding the competitors’ sites instead, all due to a drop in search engine ranking.

If you are looking to redesign, replatform or make significant changes to your site, it is important to conduct an SEO Equity analysis to identify the core keywords, site pages, and offsite links that are driving traffic and enhancing your SEO profile.

The goals of the audit are:

1. Identify pages and content that are at risk for a drop in rankings

2. Target pages that should be recreated on the new site

3. Build a 301 redirect plan to properly transfer over the highest equity content

An SEO Equity Analysis should cover the following:

Traffic from Brand vs. Non Brand Keywords  - Non branded keywords are at a higher risk for a rankings

Landing pages and % of  overall traffic – Helps to identify key content pages for 301 RedirectsHigh equity

External links – Who is linking to your site, what pages are they linking to, be sure to add those to the 301 target list

If your company is considering a significant development effort where SEO Equity may be affected, Gorilla’s Online Marketing team will be able to help with this transition.

Below shows site analytics screenshot examples of recent Gorilla redesign and replatforms. The line represents traffic from Search Engines before and after re-launch. It should be noted that post launch traffic could fluctuate until the search engines are able to re-index the new site completely. With the SEO transition plan in place you will notice a overall steady increase in SEO traffic after time.