Sea to Summit Case Study, Part 2

INTERNATIONAL SEO STRATEGY | MULTI-DOMAIN SHOPIFY WEBSITE LAUNCH

After a few months of working with Sea to Summit’s US team to overhaul and optimize the website architecture and navigation for the brand’s North America site, we were invited to provide strategic SEO direction for the ecommerce brand’s international expansion. This would involve four domains serving a multitude of regions, with websites owned and managed by the brand, the brand’s parent company–STS Distributed Brands–as well as 3rd party distribution partners. 

The Challenge: International Domains + SEO Strategy

The collective businesses had a mix of Top Level Domains (TLDs) and County Code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) and needed careful direction on how to properly structure an international digital presence and ecommerce experiences. Teams from various regions, distribution partners, and vendors were looped into business- and SEO- critical discussions and decision-making.

With the goal of staying on Shopify, our team assisted the businesses in vetting the various Shopify configuration options available to international ecommerce brands.  Some options we considered include: single domain customizations, Markets (Shopify’s international solution that was in beta at the time), ccTLDs, app integrations, as well as single versus multiple Shopify subscriptions and theme replication. The long term business implications of our recommendations were significant, so having our senior SEOs deeply involved start to finish was critical. 

Following our recommendation, the region-specific businesses agreed to roll out a new international website structure. Sharing only details that are publicly available, the main TLD (seatosummit.com) would move from the AU market to the larger US market (and act as the default domain). AU and EU regions would get their own, brand new ccTLDs (seatosummit.com.au and seatosummit.eu, respectively), and the existing seatosummitusa.com would retire. 

Buy-in from all parties was possible because we, as the global SEO partner, ensured all regions were cared for throughout the planning and decision making process. This was particularly important with the US/AU domain changes and subsequent redirect plans. 

The international site launch project would also include a website redesign supported by a new, customized Shopify theme. We worked closely with the Sea To Summit team, as well as their design and development agency partner, Avex.

The Solution: New Theme + Design Refresh + SEO Must-haves

As we entered into a Design and Development Discovery phase, our team joined most meetings related to theme selection and UI requirements. The Sea To Summit team was wise to include their SEO partner (us!) at the very beginning to ensure they selected an SEO-friendly Shopify theme that would not require an unusual amount of customization (read: dev resources) to achieve what we needed on the SEO-front. 

Fortunately much of the SEO strategy (site architecture, on-page SEO, technical SEO) had already been rolled out to the existing US website, so one of our priorities was to ensure that strategy was carried over to the new theme and domain, then tailored to be replicated across domains. 

Any technical SEO or content needs that we were unable to implement on the legacy website was made a requirement for the new site. And we were included in design and UX review meetings to ensure the brand was set up for success on the SEO, UX, and CRO fronts. 

We provided search and audience data, insights, and strategy to inform design decisions and new content and/or pages–most of which could be tailored to the other two regional domains. As the domains launched over the course of several months, we met with regional teams and even region-specific SEO teams to collaborate and ensure each domain and its respective SEO strategy was implemented correctly and in a brand-consistent manner. 

BEFORE WEBSITE REDESIGN:

Sea to Summit homepage before website redesign

AFTER WEBSITE REDESIGN:

Sea to Summit’s updated site architecture, global navigation, and header redesign

The Solution Part 2: (Truly) Ready to Launch!

Many think that website migration projects are stressful, always include some type of decline in performance, and should be avoided. They’re not completely wrong, especially for the uninitiated.

At Schleicher Marketing, we’ve become one of the few Technical SEO providers focused on Ecommerce and Migrations. We’ve supported dozens of brands through migration projects–whether that’s a domain change, new platform/CMS, redesign, or all three. And here’s our not-so-secret sauce to a successful migration, and how we supported the launch of Sea To Summit’s three international websites:

Getting your SEO partner involved early and often in the planning process ensures your website has a solid foundation. This strategy and planning phase involves a lot of heavy lifting by the SEO team, almost like an architect providing blueprints and plans for a building. 

Keeping the SEO team involved through the development phase ensures SEO-critical elements are in place and there are no surprises at launch. This is often a bit of a down time for the SEO team, as we’ve passed our recommendations, plans, strategic direction off to design, dev, content development, etc. 

Involve your SEO lead at the actual launch. That’s right, even if it’s a Sunday at 2a go-live. With SeaToSummit, we were often meeting with folks across 5 different time zones–we’re PST, the brand’s US team is MST, Avex is EST, then the brand’s AU and EU teams. Fun times!

We join launch meetings for a final review and to support any last minute needs. If this sounds like overkill, know this: we’ve been on launch calls where no one in the meeting knew how to get the UA/Google Analytics code so they were about to launch without it. But since we were present, we made sure it was in place first.

The Fun Part: The Post-launch Audit

The first few weeks after launch require high attention from everyone. The SEO team is heads-down reviewing the site and monitoring how Google crawls, renders, and indexes the new websites–often flagging urgent issues and working directly with content and dev teams to get things in order. We also queue up lower-priority improvements and opportunities for later. 

What about the day-to-day eCommerce business? 

What could easily be overlooked here is that while the brand teams were dedicating countless hours to the international website launch project, they were also still responsible for the day-to-day eCommerce operation. This includes product management and merchandising, website maintenance, new category and product launches, campaigns, and more. 

As an SEO partner committed to this brand’s success, we were able to provide SEO strategy and direction for various new product launches and site needs in parallel with the new international websites project. 

The Results: 16x ROI on SEO

Consistent investment in SEO that’s focused on search engines and people, resulted in a very real positive ROI on search marketing spend.

Every dollar invested into SEO saw a 14x return ($14.62 in revenue per $1 spent) in year 1 and even that return grew in pace by 8% to almost a 16x return in 2022, following the global website migration and launch.

Optimizing a brand for users and search engines is never a "finished" job. Customers and search engines change their behaviors and expectations daily. We're proud of what we got done in this case study, but as always, we're also excited for what's ahead for Sea to Summit and what else we can accomplish together moving forward on the strong foundation of our work to date.