Sharetea, a worldwide premium bubble tea brand, reached out to us after a failed migration. They needed help with fixing some technical issues caused by moving their website from WordPress to Squarespace CMS.
After an incorrect website migration, Sharetea suffered a significant visibility and traffic loss. Our main goal was to restore the visibility, and get our Client’s website back on the right track.
Sharetea wanted to increase the number of keywords ranked in both the TOP3 and TOP10 categories.
We often work with clients whose sites suffer performance drops after migration. Truth be told, the sooner an SEO specialist works on such issues, the better chance of regaining traffic. I was very pleased to see Sharetea’s visibility recover in such a short time!
During the migration, our Client went for was pulling the plug on the Sharetea location pages. Unfortunately, this which led to massive visibility loss. We decided to bring the pages back but that would mean introducing major modifications to the Client’s marketing plan.
One of the direct reasons for the massive drop in performance noted after the migration was due to the lack off Sharetea locations pages. The old domain version included a dedicated page for each Sharetea location. They apeared crucial for maintaining the visibility and traffic at a satisfactory level – Sharetea offers their products locally, and therefore local keywords contributed todriving prospects to the website.
Here’s what was the main challenge: due to the increasing number of local Sharetea spots, the location pages had to be updated regularly. The idea of doing so was not matching the Client marketing strategy and would force him to go back to the old site architecture. We needed to find a solution that would do both: help restore the site performance and align with Sharetea’s marketing plans.
To do so, we implemented location sites that focused on the main, most profitable spots, limit the number of pages, and carry on with driving traffic via local keywords. This solution appeared to be effective – see the graph below:
Current location page within Sharetea domain:
Current location page within Sharetea domain:
When managing website migration handling all link redirect can get tricky. In this case, Sharetea had some incorrect linking paths we needed to fix.
Another serious problem was linking within the new domain. There were several situations where links would lead to an incorrect page or create an unnecessary redirect chain.
In addition, during the migration, our client changed the whole structure of the URL addresses. Fixing the linking was crucial to restoring the website’s performance. We also fixed flawed URLs that weren’t indexed due to duplication that was not canonicalized or redirected.
Technical SEO happens to be a huge part of the recovery process for Sharetea. First stop? Heading structure that required a bit of improvement.
There were a few things we had to work on to improve the heading structure. For example, some pages lacked the H2 headings. Neither did they include relevant keyword phrases. To fix that, we optimized the hierarchy and implemented the right keywords for a higher website’s ranking.
An example of heading optimization – adding H2s.
An example of fixing the heading hierarchy (H1>H2>H3 instead of H1>H3) and keyword implementation
Next step, our team took care of the internal linking. Hyperlinks needed to be implemented on the wider scale. This helped us connect and group the web content together.
Sharetea’s website lacked a strategic technical SEO element, which is internal linking. To fix that, we placed internal links within the site content, usually using anchors that included important keywords.
An example of content with implemented internal links
What seems to be just a tiny cosmetic change, in reality helps keywords perform better in SERP.
Using the list of keywords selected for the process, we formatted the content and highlighted relevant phrases:
Another vital pillar of the SEO strategy prepared for Sharetea was content creation.
To promote website visibility, we decided to focus on the content creation process. Previously, Sharetea didn’t have a company blog, so there was a lot to do here! Alongside the initial keyword research, every 30 days we planned a monthly blog post schedule to help Sharetea grow visibility for more business-relevant phrases. Here are a few examples of blog post performance
An example of monthly content recommendations for our Client:
Link building is an inseparable part of Delante’s SEO strategy. For Sharetea, we focused on building a steady backlink growth for domain link profile.
The crux of the off-site process was the quality-focused link building. Following ourstandard procedure of strengthening our Client’s domain authority, our team was obtaining backlinks from strong referring domains, thematically related to Sharetea’s site.
All links were manually created and checked for quality.
As part of the process, we also prepared sponsored content for Sharetea. This facilitated an extra boost to keywords that had already ranked high (in TOP10), consequently helping them reach even higher positions.
Afer 6 months of SEO cooperation with Sharetea, we achieved the core goal – we restored the visibility that was lost due to the website migration.
In addition, the SEO process proves to be effective over time. Take a look at how the visibility has changed throughout 6 months of optimizations:
