Worthington Direct SEO Redesign (Re-platform)

Overview

Client: Worthington Direct
Industry: Online Retail
Services: SEO Redesign

Results:
155% increase in transactions from the organic channel YOY

Objective

Worthington Direct wanted to move from their custom-built CMS and ecommerce platform to a leading vendor supported solution, that had more native features to enhance the functionality and capabilities of their public facing website/ecommerce store, and a more robust fulfillment back end that would increase efficiencies in managing products and orders.

As Vizion has worked with Worthington Direct for over 15 years and built up a strong organic presence for some very competitive keywords, the site migration onto a new platform needed to have as little negative impact on organic traffic as possible.

Solution

Vizion’s approach was to ensure that the migration did not also include a redesign but tried to keep the number of changes to a minimum. With any platform change, there will naturally be some changes in site architecture, internal linking and page template code that can’t be avoided. Adding a redesign to the project not only adds to the overall cost, but also adds another layer of complexity in being able to compare performance pre- and post-launch.

As the staging site was being built, it was compared to the production site, to document any differences in the platforms and provide solutions to get ahead of any potential SEO issues.

Vizion also coordinated with other marketing channels to ensure that their landing pages and digital assets were also accounted for and didn’t add to any potential unforeseen disruption or complexity.

A migration tracker document was used to record key site performance and SEO metrics starting several weeks pre- and continuing post-launch to closely monitor crawling activity, rankings, site traffic, and user behavior to determine how the new site was performing through the entire customer journey.

Vizion worked directly with the development team to document, prioritize and QA any issues that arose and ensure that they were taken care of quickly. This is a critical step, as search engines will usually increase crawling when they find broad changes to a site, so any issues needed to be addressed quickly.

Results

11%gain in top 3 rankings

The new site launched mid-January 2022 and since then rankings have not seen the typical site migration traffic dip that many other sites experience with these types of changes. When looking at the spread of non-brand organic rankings on Google from the month prior the site launch, to the month post-launch, we see an 11% gain in top 3 rankings and a 5% gain in in top 100 non-brand organic rankings, as shown by the table below:

T Worthington Direct SEO Redesign Vizion Interactive

Looking at the data further we see two major improvements in rankings:

  • They gained an additional 1,441 keywords ranking in the top 100 results
  • Existing keywords improved rankings

155% increase in transactions

Worthington Direct experienced a 22% increase in traffic and a 155% increase in transactions from the organic channel year-over-year. Revenue is at an all-time high and they’re now looking to Vizion to help them expand into new areas.

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