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.
What are the key takeaways from this retailer redesign case study?
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.
How can you get in touch for organic growth consulting?
If you are looking for someone to help with your organic growth your just someone to bounce some ideas, send me a message.