Office Supply Website Migration
Case Study

The client is a leading office supplies retailer that primarily caters to businesses in sub-rural and rural Victoria, including areas such as South Gippsland, the Bass Coast, and Mornington Peninsula. It is part of a larger network of office supply retailers across the country.

The client approached us with the following key challenges.

• Their main website was being impacted by the existence of two subdomains that were not properly integrated into the main site.
• This fracturing between subdomains and the main website impacted discoverability and traffic flow and also caused confusion among consumers.
• This also undermined their desire to have a unified brand presence
• Additionally, technical SEO issues, such as duplicate content and inefficient redirects, were impacting their overall main site performance

For successful site migrations, it begins with mapping out how the migration itself will be executed.

We started with a comprehensive audit focused on both subdomains, as well as the main website, to ensure we identified any key technical issues and SEO opportunities. This would also help us ensure that content would be properly redirected once the migration was executed.

We also merged relevant content from both of the subdomains to the main website and worked in additional optimisations for the high-traffic keywords. Product listings and categories were also streamlined for an improved user experience.

Between the two subdomains, we ensured all relevant URLs from both were effectively redirected to the main website through a robust 301 redirect strategy. This ensured link equity would be preserved and guarantee a smooth transition for users and search engines.

Finally, we integrated a range of technical SEO fixes to resolve issues tied to broken links, canonical tags, and duplicate content.

The website migration showcased how, with the appropriate preparation and a methodical approach to technical SEO, merging multiple subdomains into one main site can be achieved without any unwanted impact on overall performance. In fact, when handled with the right plan in mind, it can help strengthen the main website and improve the user experience for all.

Thanks to auditing all three websites (the main site and two subdomains), progressively redirecting the subdomains to the main site, and implementing a range of SEO improvements as part of the process, we managed to create a transition that effortlessly brought traffic over to the main site. And we did this without seeing any drops in traffic to the site itself.

Importantly, this migration addressed the issue of traffic being splintered between multiple sites and solidified the main brand to consumers. Another key benefit to driving all previous traffic to the one website was that it led to improved rankings on search engines and, by extension, increased its discoverability online – this was a key objective for the client.

The SEO refinements of removing duplicated pages and optimising content on key pages through the integration of comprehensive FAQs helped make it a more authoritative and user-friendly website. Local SEO strategies were also integrated, identifying key service areas such as the Mornington Peninsula, South Gippsland, and Bass Coast. This brought about more conversions from qualified Victorian-based prospects and customers.