About TOMS:
About TOMS:TOMS, derived from the word tomorrow, was conceptualized by its Founder, Blake Mycoskie as a philanthropic effort following his heart wrenching visit to Argentina. He not only volunteered a brilliant initiative but created a unique business model. The business model ‘One for One‘ which has been trademarked by the company, is meant to provide a pair of shoes to needy, for the sale of its each retail product. This started during Blake’s visit to Argentina in 2006, when he noticed many children running barefooted.
It has now been further expanded to eye wear, apparel & coffee. TOMS has been recognized all over with many awards to its kitty. Prominent ones being ‘People’s Design Award’ in 2006 and has been in top ten most innovative retail companies.
Business Objectives of TOMS:
Since, they had migrated to newly designed website, TOMS required assistance in SEO for couple of reasons:-
- Optimize newly designed site
- Preserve organic rankings upon launch of new website
- Rank higher on generic as well as brand keywords
- Handle high volume traffic issues
- Manage SEO
Website migration is a crucial stage in SEO, wherein a number of risks are involved. These are ranking maintenance, traffic loss, ranking drops or even revenue loss in case it gets all wrong. So, an expert hand is always welcome to avoid any pitfalls. Hence, TOMS approached Wpromote, which is a online marketing company providing services in SEO & PPC management.
Strategies Adopted By TOMS:
Though Wpromote was given the task to perform seamless site migration, TOMS strategically used link building to boost their rankings and gain domain authority. Few of the tasks were:-
- Reputation management
- Outreach to show and fashion blogs
- Review solicitation
- Badging campaigns
Since online reviews and social media have become a rage today, reputation management has become a business function itself for companies. Terms such as ‘Online Reputation Management’ have come up as a strong area to practice and TOMS utilized the same for its branding. They also targeted fashion blogs to get inbound links since the target customers were same.
Actions performed by Wpromote included the following:-
- Created Migration Plan & Schedule
- Provided Detailed URL Mapping
- Developed Traffic Influx Plan
- Offloaded Traffic to Additional Servers
- Developed Multiple Homepage URLs
- Avoided Canonicalization Issues
- Removed Duplicate Content
- Performed Server Testing & Recommendations
All these were performed while Wpromote garnered their technical expertise and executed successful migration of the website.
Results Achieved By TOMS:
The results achieved were commendable as TOMS saw a daily traffic peak of over 115,000 unique visitors, a 1,100% increase. Because of offloading of traffic from one server to other servers, huge traffic spurts were easily handled and there was no downtime for the site. TOMS also topped search results for branded and generic terms.
Key Learnings:
As a business there are times when you might have to migrate to a new website or the site itself may require overhaul of the design. That might involve the risk associated with the transfer and hence, if proper steps are taken we can avert any mishap. It is always recommended to devise a critical plan with clear set objectives to be achieved during migration.
