Tailored strategy for a complex international domain migration for Trucks.co.uk grows website traffic by 30% through SEO.
About Trucks
The Dutch Trucks.nl is an international platform where providers of trucks, work vehicles, cars and vehicle parts can advertise. Thanks to the platform, international providers and buyers of vehicles find each other every day.
Challenge
Although visitors from an average of more than 200 countries were able to find the website, Trucks.com offered the multilingual content only on a .com domain extension. To promote further growth, a more international appeal and achieve higher SEO positions in multiple countries, the choice of a .com domain extension spoke for itself.
The importance of a successful migration proved enormous, as Trucks.nl has a complete online focus and organic traffic accounts for more than half of all acquisition. The number of possible problems with such a large migration is enormous and herein lay the biggest challenge: to successfully complete a migration with minimal loss of website visitors and minimal loss in organic search results.
Approach
Tomahawk was tasked with successfully migrating all non-Dutch languages to the new Trucksnl.com and correctly distributing the more than 10 million urls across 10 countries. "A crucial process that was managed by Tomahawk and in which redirect chains from a legacy 301 scheme were also "briefly" fixed. An extra step that Tomahawk has taken," said Niels Weberink (Online Marketing Manager at Trucks.nl).
To complete this complex migration, we used 2 test environments and chose to go live in phases for each language. According to Niels Weberink, this was the best advice. "Should unexpected problems come to light during Google's redesign, we could avoid these problems in the next language. In the end it turned out not to be necessary, but it was a reassuring thought. So we converted the last 5 languages in one go". Thanks to the impact analyses made, we knew what aspects we had to pay attention to during such a migration.
Result
In a month and a half, all migration work was successfully completed. The number of website sessions showed an equal trend with the period before the migration, without a major decline as is the case with many migrations. In addition, the upward trend of website visits compared to the same period last year has continued. We see a 30% increase in visits via SEO even after the rebranding.
