Case study: Volvopentashop — copy (EN)

eCommerce · parts catalogue · Volvo Group

Volvopentashop: over 1,000,000 URLs mapped through a CMS migration

Lead: The brief was almost a joke: outrank one specific competitor on one specific query. And, while you’re at it, move the site to a new CMS. Both were delivered.

• Over 1M URLs crawled and mapped, old structure to new
• Migration completed with no unplanned losses
• Outranked the named competitor on the target query

Small print under the bar:

This is a technical case. The metric isn’t traffic — it’s the integrity of an enterprise catalogue migration.

The brief was unusually concrete. Two items:

1. Outrank a specific competitor — marinepartseurope.com — on the query volvo penta parts. 2. Support the site’s migration to a new CMS.

The first item is nearly comic: the client named the competitor and said “get above them.” The second turned out to be the reason this case is worth writing.

Why the framework ran in reverse here

We normally start from the question of where a limited resource should go — that’s what our WEDGE framework answers, with a competence map and an assessment of which directions are reachable.

Here the direction was set from outside, as a single query. The client had already run their own selection and arrived with the decision made.

So the work began where our framework puts the Evaluate step: is that position reachable at all with the site as it stands, and what would it take technically?

The answer turned out not to be about content or links. It was about whether the site would survive the migration.

Migrating to a new CMS is routine work, right up until the site is large.

This was an enterprise parts catalogue. That means hundreds of thousands of SKUs, nested categories, variants, and historical addresses accumulated over years.

We crawled and mapped over 1,000,000 URLs: old address → new.

Not “configured a redirect rule.” We took the structure apart, matched it against the new one, and verified the correspondence — across a million addresses.

The outcome of the migration

The site moved with no losses other than those agreed with the client in advance.

That phrasing matters. In a migration this size there are always pages deliberately left behind: obsolete SKUs, duplicates, discontinued parts. The difference between a professional migration and an accident is that in the first case, that list is written and signed before the move.

The conditions this happened in

We worked inside the industrial group’s own infrastructure, on their staging environment rather than an ordinary one.

Anyone who has done SEO for a corporation this size knows what that implies: access takes weeks to arrange, release windows are fixed, and every change passes several levels of approval.

Both objectives were met:

• we ranked above marinepartseurope.com on volvo penta parts;
• the site moved to the new CMS with no unplanned losses.

Traffic through the working period

Caption:

Per Ahrefs, across the working period. Traffic in Ahrefs is an estimate from its own index.

Enterprise runs at a different tempo

332 hours across 30 months is about 11 hours a month. That’s unusually low for us, and the reason isn’t the volume of work — it’s how work moves inside a large corporation: approvals, release windows, queues.

We publish that figure because it’s honest and therefore useful. If you’re planning SEO inside an enterprise, budget for approval speed rather than execution speed.

The peak came before the finish

Traffic topped out around 12,000 in mid-2020; by the end of the work it was around 6,000. We don’t build the headline on that and we don’t hide it either.

Migrating a large catalogue is a mapping job, not a rule. A million addresses don’t move on a regular expression. They have to be taken apart.

The list of deliberate losses is written before the move, not after. Before, it’s a decision. After, it’s an incident.

In enterprise, approvals are the bottleneck, not the work. Eleven hours a month across two and a half years.

A concrete brief saves everyone time. “Get above this site on this query” is the clearest brief we’ve ever received.

Work concluded in December 2020. The objectives had been met, and the engagement ended there.

What happened to the site afterwards is outside our involvement.

Planning a large catalogue migration?

Enterprise migration, hundreds of thousands of addresses, the risk of losing your search presence. We’ve done this inside a large industrial group.

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