After a full migration of the Mobile B2B Retailer’s site to Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) in August 2017, organic traffic declined drastically. Then in November 2017, the client’s site migrated to HTTPS and sold its printer business. By January 2018, organic traffic was down by almost 50% YoY. The client partnered with Merkle SEO to correct the downward trend.

Fixing organic performance meant overcoming several complex issues:

• Evaluating performance pre- and post-migration at the individual keyword level
• Individual page-level performance comparisons due to URLs changing post migration
• Understanding the nuanced changes in the site built pre- and post-migration
• Navigating through the dependencies between B2B and B2C
• Heavy competition exists in the SERP between owned entities.
• Over half of the pre-migration traffic was from international searches landing on the wrong country site resulting in non-conversions

The recovery strategy consisted of three pillars:

• Identify which areas of the site lost the most traffic, and had the most impact on lead conversions to help focus the audit and achieve meaningful results faster.
• Conduct a technical SEO audit of the new platform with emphasis on redirects, crawlability, indexing signals, and SEO-friendliness of the new site’s content and design.
• Optimize keyword signals to grow the size of the ranking keyword profile, improve overall rankings for high-value keywords, and reduce competition with the B2C site.