Penn Elcom Launch Their New International Magento Site

The Solution:

Penn Elcom previously had two sites that served their trade users and direct customers:

• https://pennelcomonline.com/
• https://www.penn-elcom.com/

Each previous site had a multilingual online store which was crucial for targeting an international audience. However, the sites were not commercially suited to increase revenue whilst attracting new users and customers. They wanted an all-in-one platform that allowed them to organically perform better, ensuring returning customers were provided with a seamless online journey, whilst facilitating trade visitors.

AYKO supported and created an SEO migration strategy that ticked all boxes to deliver success:

• A full SEO analysis on the current two Penn Elcom sites to identify core pages which needed prioritising when migrating
• A full crawl of all current sites to identify pages to map over to their new Magento platform
• Created a redirect map for all stores - 10 redirect maps in total
• Mapped, tested and implemented a redirect map for all stores
• Optimised URL structures:
  • Outlined SEO technical enhancements on their new Magento 2 platform to enhance the visibility of the site
  • Hreflang for international targeting
  • Robots.txt file to remove any unnecessary URLs from being crawled
  • XML Sitemap configuration
  • Schema markup implementation
  • Enhanced page speed
  • Canonical tags
  • Google Search Console configuration
  • GA4 configuration
• Addressed core web vitals and UX to increase conversion rate and deliver a seamless user journey
• Mapped across all core content to ensure that no organic value was lost in the migration
• Ensured metadata was mapped to align with the user intent
• Created a new Google Tag Manager (GTM) container with enhanced conversion tracking set up to understand purchase value

The Results

Since completing the SEO migration for Penn Elcom, the client has seen a gradual increase in traffic from consolidating two sites into one.

Our Recommendations:

A migration of any site is a time-consuming process and SEO must not be neglected when changing platforms or domains. You must have a thorough pre and post-go-live checklist to ensure that all SEO value in your previous site is migrated to your new one. We would always recommend:

• Define what success looks like before beginning the SEO migration
• Identifying technical fixes on the current site and agreeing on the technical infrastructure of the new platform/domain
• Ensure both parties are on the same page when it comes to technical configurations
• Have a complete pre and post-migration checklist to avoid errors or loss in organic performance
• Start early! Getting ahead of the schedule is crucial for addressing unexpected errors throughout the migration process
• Crawl the current live site and identify all pages which require to be migrated
• Get a copy of all current content/metadata which will need to be mapped to the new URL structure
• Map redirects and test!
• Ensure all tracking and conversion tracking is set up and tested before going live with the new site