Fortune-100 Retailer Redesign & Category Expansion
Guided a relaunch with millions of new URLs; protected core demand and returned to above-baseline traffic within 7 months through redirect governance, IA, and sitemap strategy.
TL;DR
I was engaged to guide a major U.S. retailer through a full site redesign + massive category/product expansion. The engagement lasted 18 months, with the redesigned site at 6-month mark.
We expected a short-term dip as legacy content was retired and millions of new URLs rolled out.
The site hit a controlled trough right after launch, then recovered and surpassed pre-launch levels within 7 months.
Monthly organic traffic moved from a pre-launch baseline of ~25M to ~38M on the 12-month mark of the launch.
Total ranking keywords went from ~15M → ~4M (trough) → ~16M, and #1–3 rankings finished above pre-launch.
Context & goals
Company: Fortune-100 retailer (multi-category eCommerce).
My role: SEO Consultant (Jan 2016 → Jul 2017).
Project: full redesign, new IA, and mass launch of new categories & products; deprecation of some legacy areas.
Goals: 1) protect as much existing organic demand as feasible during migration; 2) accelerate indexing of new content; 3) regain and grow rankings once new architecture settled.
Challenges
Scale & change amplitude: tens of millions of ranking keywords and >600k → >2M crawlable pages across the transition window.
Mixed intent inventory: retire underperforming/obsolete legacy sections without creating index bloat or soft-404s.
Facets & duplication risk: filters/sorting/pagination could explode URL count and dilute signals.
Holiday seasonality: launch proximity (Dec) made it hard to separate seasonal spikes from migration effects.
Crawl budget & discoverability: ensure new category/product URLs were findable, linked, and included in sitemaps from day one.
What I did (high-impact interventions)
Redirect & retirement governance
Mapped legacy → new at scale (rules + exceptions); built a “keep / combine / retire” matrix to avoid blind 1:1s.
Prevented soft-404 chains and irrelevant hops; used 410 for dead ends to protect crawl budget.
Information architecture & internal linking
Re-framed category → subcategory → product flows; established hub → cluster linking and “related” rails.
Reserved top-nav and footer real estate for high-value families; added breadcrumbs with consistent canonicals.
Faceted navigation controls
Robots/canonicals for non-value facets; pre-approved “index-worthy” facets (brand/size/color, as needed).
Normalized parameters and pagination (
rel=prev/nextequivalent handling) to reduce duplication.
Schema & product feed hygiene
Rolled out Product, Offer, AggregateRating, BreadcrumbList; aligned feed attributes to markup.
Tightened title/structured-data parity to stabilize rich results.
XML sitemaps & discovery
Segmented, freshness-ordered index sitemaps (cats / subcats / product-in-stock / seasonal).
Fast re-submit cadence post-launch; monitored inclusion/latency and server logs.
Monitoring & rollback playbook
Built a daily post-launch dashboard (traffic, indexation, bucketed rankings, 404/soft-404, 5xx spikes).
Instituted change-freeze windows and a clear rollback path for any regressive template changes.
Deliverables
Redirect/retirement matrix with business rules + exception log.
IA & internal-linking blueprint (category depth, rail logic, breadcrumbs).
Facet governance (robots, canonicals, param handling, pagination spec).
Schema implementation checklist for categories/products.
Segmented XML sitemap plan + submission SOP.
Post-launch monitoring dashboards and incident playbook.
Results
Traffic
Pre-launch baseline: ~25M/month.
Launch month: seasonal spike (~38M), then expected normalization.
Immediate post-launch trough: ~28M (seasonal comedown + migration).
Recovery: ~38M (~50% above initial levels), indicating recovery beyond pre-launch baseline as new categories indexed.
Index / pages in play
Tracked crawlable pages grew from ~0.6–0.7M pre-launch to ~2.3M, reflecting new category/product breadth without uncontrolled facet bloat.
Keyword visibility
Pre-work reference: ~15M total; ~0.8M in #1–3.
Launch: ~4.9M total; ~0.23M in #1–3 (expected contraction during reindex).
Trough: ~4.1M total; ~0.20M in #1–3.
End of engagement: ~15.8M total; ~0.86M in #1–3.
From trough → end: ~4× total keywords, ~4× #1–3.
Versus initial: #1–3 finished above baseline, indicating quality recovery, not just breadth.
Why it worked
Intent-driven deprecation: we pruned or 410’d legacy URLs that no longer served demand, preventing bloat and preserving crawl budget for new lines.
Signals concentrated where it mattered: IA, internal links and schema focused authority on category hubs and in-stock products.
Fast discoverability: segmented sitemaps and log-based monitoring cut inclusion latency for new content.
Tight post-launch ops: dashboards, freeze windows and a clear rollback plan turned a risky cutover into a controlled recovery.
Get in touch
If you are looking for someone to help with your organic growth your just someone to bounce some ideas, send me a message.