E-Commerce Cart Migration SEO Advice

Hi all,

First time post here.

We operate a small ecommerce store and plan on moving cart, most likely from Interspire to Magento or possibly Prestashop.

We want to be sure not to damage our current search rankings when making this move and ideally improve our rankings at the same time by utilizing the new cart’s seo functionality as best we can.

Stage 1 of the project will see us simply move our current store from one cart to another. For this move we are keeping our existing single domain and intend on moving our current set up without making many, if any changes to content, product descriptions , URL’s etc as we believe this best practice for ensuring our current rankings remain as they are- is such thinking correct? Or should we do otherwise

Stage 2 would see us operate a multi lingual, multistore, with 4 domains operating with 1 back end. For the 3 new domains we are looking to set up these storefronts in whichever manner will be most beneficial from an seo perspective

We welcome any advice as to what we should consider? What we should and shouldn’t do? and best practices for this project

Please advise if any other information is required to best answer our query

Thanks for taking the time to read our post, any forthcoming tips and advice will be greatly appreciated

 

Sounds like you're changing platforms?

I know you've said you're trying not to, but if you change any URLs, please PLEASE ensure you're using 301s - pages that previously ranked and no longer exist will damage your visibility in search. Be methodical with a spreadsheet with original URL, new URL and new meta/content/etc. It'd be an idea to change any internal linking which is pointing to old pages. The 301s should handle it, but there's no guarantees regarding the passing-on of 'link juice' through a 301, and a new internal link is likely to have more of an effect more quickly.
If you're worried about rankings, i assume they're pretty good already? Am I right in assuming you're already using canonicals?
Make sure your new site's crawlable once you've gone live, be mindful of your robots.txt file. If you're developing on a test server and push the robots.txt live too, it'll stop search engines from crawling the new version of the site. Wuh-oh!
There's a change of address option in GWT too, so once you've moved, you can 'tell' Google and encourage a site re-crawl.
As far as your multi lingual stage, watch out for duplicate content. Simply translating descriptions etc isn't enough, I'm afraid. Using 3 domains means you can use country targeting to again 'tell' Google the site is most relevant to a particular country, but make sure that content's different.

Best of Luck.

 

Both Magento and Woo Commerce for wordpress, of course, will allow you to append your urls. This may be a non issue but I would need to see the site to advise you accordingly.

Nigel

 

Thankyou for your replies,

Yes we are changing platform, either going with Magento or Prestashop. Can you advise what platform you believe to be better for multi-lingual & multi store set up? (Our site offers 100 - 150 products)

We will be keeping the same URL's if possible , however i was informed that this might not be possible due to a different set up and protocol. Have you had experience doing this previously?

Our rankings are good at the moment for certain keywords . I will need to check with regards to the canonicals as i am unsure at this moment. We will be looking to get a highly regarded SEO consultant for the changeover so we do not create any issues for the site or affect the rankings as there is now a lot more work than we previously thought.

We would be looking to have native speakers translate the pages and look to change them slightly to avoid the issues you have mentioned, thanks for the information.

 

If you can shoot me a link I can be entirely specific.

Nigel

 

I feel magento is much more search engine friendlier then prestashop, with product names automatically becoming H1 tags in the product pages, I think what more you can ask? And if you are looking for a hard core ecommerce engine then your choice should be magento, as it allows you to integrate your website with any crm, erp, accounting package etc. So of course it has multi store, multi website features as default.