Reversing a £38.4M loss of revenue per quarter into 219% growth opportunity in 48 months
A FTSE-250 public company underwent a significant transformation, rebranding to a shorter name and transitioning from one domain to a more concise domain. At the same time, they re-platformed from a customised off-the-shelf e-commerce web solution to a fully bespoke in-house solution which lead to substantial revenue loss.
Expertise
We support with the following services for Migration Disaster Recovery.
Data from SEMRush showing the migration point from 2.6M visitors per month to 900K per month in June 2015, followed by 219% growth by July 2019
Challenge
Post-migration, the company faced significant issues. The product and engineering teams were tasked with delivering a full domain migration as well as an e-commerce storefront (IBM Websphere7) migration within a 14-month period. The timeline was tight due to licensing renewals. They had a media agency helping with SEO, along with a small internal SEO team who were under-resourced. It was not possible to roll back the migration.
Urgency for Solutions
With an upcoming quarterly earnings report, the company urgently needed to address the decline in online visibility and potential revenue loss.
Decline in Google Rankings and Revenue Loss
A critical 50% drop in search engine rankings following the domain transition, which approximated to £38.4M in revenue.
Knowledge and Resource Gap
Despite having a competent e-commerce development team, the company lacked technical SEO expertise, exacerbated by an underfunded and resource-strained SEO team.
Solution
We brought together the disaster recovery team in 96 hours (including legal, procurement and onboarding)
Historical Decision Making
We read through all historical documentation related to the migration to understand the expected vs. reality.
Prioritisation & Knowledge
We worked with the Product and Development teams to priotise the issues, as well as support with knowledge transfer of technical SEO platform best practices.
Technical Investigation
We audited the entire custom webstore platform front end and APIs to identify technical issues that caused the rank loss
On-going Support
We supported the company through the 16 month roadmap, providing user-acceptance testing on staging, followed by go-live checks and industry updates.
3
Critical Issues/Bugs found
We discovered that the URL routing middleware had a bug that allowed internal links and canonical elements to append to themselves, creating mass duplication. In addition, webpage resources were being blocked. It took substantial effort to resolve these issues.
31
Further High/Med Issues
We identified additional issues that would need to be addressed over the next 48 months.
219%
Increase in visitors Year on Year
The final result after the 48 month period was 28 of the 31 issues were resolved, leading to substantial growth. The new platform continues to support their expansion as they started acquiring other brands in 2020.
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