SEO Case Study: Migrating Tradesy to Vestiaire Collective in 6 Months

SEO migration | Vestiaire Collective

As businesses grow and evolve, website migrations become crucial for expansion and enhanced user experiences. In March 2022, Vestiaire Collective acquired Tradesy, its American counterpart. As a leading online marketplace specializing in pre-owned luxury fashion items growing rapidly in the US, migrating the Tradesy website to the Vestiaire Collective website smoothly and in a timely manner was critical both for our new and experienced users.

Mission accomplished! Thanks to incredible team efforts, we successfully completed the soft migration of tradesy.com to us.vestiairecollective.com in only six months. This in-depth article outlines the sophisticated, data-driven techniques and strategies employed to ensure a smooth and efficient migration, ultimately leading to significant improvements in keyword rankings, traffic, and overall website performance.

Data-Driven Techniques and Strategies

1. Leveraging Search Console Data for URL Analysis
   The first step in the process was to identify all the URLs on tradesy.com that had received at least two clicks in the past 16 months. This information was extracted from Google Search Console, a tool that helps website owners monitor and optimize their search performance. With this data in hand, the team could then focus on redirecting these high-performing URLs to their corresponding pages on us.vestiairecollective.com.

2. Deleting Duplicate Products
To ensure a seamless transition, all duplicate products on Tradesy were deleted, as they would be redirected 1-to-1 by the IT team. This step helped to avoid any confusion or duplicate content issues during the migration process.

3. Competitor Benchmarking with SEMrush
SEMrush, an SEO tool that provides data on competitor performance, was used to benchmark the performance of Tradesy and Vestiaire Collective. This analysis helped the team to identify gaps and areas of opportunity in terms of keywords and SEO strategies.

4. Matching URLs Using Search Console and Scraping APIs
A combination of Search Console data and web scraping APIs was used to identify the best Vestiaire Collective URL for each Tradesy URL. This process involved finding the keyword that drove the most clicks for each Tradesy URL and then searching site:us.vestiairecollective.com {Tradesy keyword} to find the most relevant page on the new domain.

5. Manual 1-to-1 Matching for High-Performing URLs
For the remaining URLs that generated significant traffic, the team performed a manual 1-to-1 matching process. This ensured that the most relevant and high-performing pages were accurately redirected to their new counterparts on Vestiaire Collective’s domain.

6. Breadcrumb Scraping for Category Matching
To further refine the matching process, the team used web scraping techniques to extract the last breadcrumb element from each Tradesy URL. This information was then used to match Tradesy’s categories with those on Vestiaire Collective, ensuring a smooth user experience and preserving SEO value.

Categories | Vestiaire Collective website

7. Redirecting Unmatched Brands and Closet URLs to the Homepage
For brands not available on Vestiaire Collective and unmatched closet URLs, the team chose to redirect these pages to the homepage of us.vestiairecollective.com. This strategy helped to maintain a positive user experience and preserve some of the SEO value from these pages.

8. Catalog Page Matching and Product Page Redirects
The team successfully matched over 30,000 catalog pages between the two websites, ensuring that users could easily find the products they were looking for on the new domain. For product pages, the team implemented redirect rules based on product IDs, with special consideration for products that were migrated by the sellers themselves. This meticulous approach ensured that legacy Tradesy URLs were taken into account during the migration process.

Results Achieved

Migration announcement on the website

The successful migration of Tradesy.com to us.vestiairecollective.com yielded impressive results, demonstrating the effectiveness of the detailed and data-driven techniques employed:

• Catalog Page Matching: A total of 30,000 catalog pages were matched and redirected, ensuring a seamless user experience while minimizing any potential traffic loss.
• Product Page Redirection: ID-based rules were implemented to redirect product pages, including specific tactics for products that were migrated by the sellers themselves. This approach ensured that visitors could easily access the desired items on the new site.
• Legacy URL Consideration: The migration plan took into account legacy URLs from Tradesy, ensuring that these older links were also redirected and maintained their value in terms of search rankings and user experience.
• Keyword Growth: The total number of keywords targeted by the website doubled, reflecting a more comprehensive and robust SEO strategy that catered to a wider range of search queries.
• Improved Ranking Positions: The number of keywords ranking in the top 3 positions (1–3) experienced substantial growth and doubled as well. This improvement indicates enhanced visibility in search results, leading to higher click-through rates and increased organic traffic.

TOP 3 trends

• Large-scale URL Redirection: A total of 800K URLs were redirected throughout the migration process, showcasing the vast scope and meticulous planning involved in successfully executing such an extensive migration project.
• Advanced Tracking: To better understand the user journey and identify visitors searching for Tradesy in Google, tracking was implemented to pinpoint users who landed on us.vestiairecollective.com after searching for Tradesy-related terms. This information provided valuable insights into user behavior and allowed for further optimization of the website experience for these visitors.
• User Engagement and Retention: The migration resulted in improved user engagement and retention rates, as users searching for Tradesy were seamlessly redirected to the corresponding pages on us.vestiairecollective.com. This positively impacted key engagement metrics such as bounce rate, time on site, and pages per session.

These results testify to the effectiveness of the data-driven techniques, meticulous planning, and rigorous execution employed throughout the migration process. Speaking of which, let’s dive deep into the key steps of our global migration plan in the next section.

Detailed Migration Plan: 8 Major Steps

Social media announcement

1. Preparatory Measures: Integration and verification of Tradesy’s Search Console, IP whitelisting to facilitate website crawling, obtaining admin access for Google Analytics, and conducting an in-depth analysis of Tradesy’s SEO templates and tools.
2. Current Situation Evaluation: Benchmarking hard and soft KPIs (search analytics and indexed pages), assessing link profiles (including toxicity cleanup), generating a migration SEO checklist, and establishing a precise migration timeline.
3. Redirection Planning: Crafting a detailed mapping strategy by page type based on crawl results, evaluating external link structures, identifying and rectifying crawling errors and additional redirect requirements, refining redirection spreadsheets, and validating redirection rules in collaboration with the development team, followed by a thorough final review with DevOps.
4. Deployment Phase: Uploading the carefully crafted redirection plan (to remain live for at least one year post-migration) and executing the post-migration SEO checklist.
5. Tracking Implementation: Updating Search Console and Google Analytics with the change of address features, settings adjustments, and ensuring thorough documentation.
6. Communication Strategy: Incorporating the former name in title tags and meta descriptions, featuring it in the website footer, designing interstitials for redirected users, and updating social media account handles and descriptions.
7. Promotion and Outreach: Orchestrating email announcements, public relations campaigns, guest posts, social media engagement, Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and updating LinkedIn profiles.
8. Monitoring and Adjustment: Establishing a dedicated dashboard to track the migration’s impact and make data-driven adjustments as needed.

Conclusion

Vestiaire Collective’s successful soft migration of Tradesy.com to us.vestiairecollective.com exemplifies the power of meticulous planning, data-driven execution, and thorough monitoring in achieving a seamless transition. Leveraging data, employing multiple techniques, and adhering to a comprehensive migration plan enabled the company to achieve remarkable improvements in keyword rankings, traffic, and overall website performance. This case study provides valuable insights and serves as a model for effectively managing large-scale website migrations in the e-commerce sector, particularly when dealing with complex, multi-faceted websites in the luxury fashion space.