This case study highlights a full-scale SEO and platform migration for a leading pet pharmaceutical company. The project focused on restructuring navigation, simplifying URL paths, and building a future-ready foundation for organic growth. One week after launch, the site achieved more than 2000 improved keyword positions, 31 new keyword rankings on category pages, and a 19% increase in Google search impressions. Organic sessions increased by 20%, while revenue from SEO rose by 18%, with no post-launch ranking losses. This transformation has positioned the company to scale efficiently, improve user experience, and maintain visibility as AI-driven search evolves.
Client Overview
A nationally recognized direct-to-consumer pet pharmaceutical company with over 20 years of online retail experience partnered with us to modernize their e-commerce platform and improve organic search performance. With a vast product catalog and a growing focus on pet wellness education, the client needed a scalable navigation structure that would better serve both users and search engines.
Project Overview
Launch Date: June 2025
Project: Nav-Taxonomy Restructure with Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) Integration
The Challenge
The client’s previous website architecture used outdated .html URL structures, lacked cohesive internal linking, and had limited scalability for category expansion. These issues were constraining organic growth, limiting crawl efficiency, and complicating content management.
Our goal was to:
- Improve site crawlability and user experience
- Elevate category-level visibility in search results
- Cleanly separate informational and commercial content
- Support future merchandising flexibility via a new PIM system
Implementation Strategy
- Launched a new global navigation system highlighting product categories
- Migrated legacy category pages to a new /category/… URL structure
- Implemented 301 redirects from all legacy URLs
- Separated educational content to an off-site domain for clarity and compliance
- Prepared product pages for future migration to extension-free URLs
Results One Week Post-Launch
Rankings & Visibility
- 5,100 keywords now rank on the new /category/… URLs
- Average keyword position improvement: 21 positions
- 132 keywords reached page 2 or better
- 19% increase in Google impressions site-wide
- No keyword loss on migrated category pages
New Keyword Performance
- 31 newly ranking keywords tied to category pages
- 2,347 total keyword improvements
- 817 new SERP features (e.g., featured snippets, FAQs)
Lost Keywords
Of the 579 keywords that dropped, nearly all were tied to known pages already being phased out or queued for repair:
- 33 dynamic comparison pages
- 27 informational /educational pages
- 97 deprecated categories
- 399 product pages pending redirects
Organic Traffic Performance
- Organic search traffic: +20.1%
- Organic views: +19.9%
- Referral traffic: +55.8%
- AI-generated (unassigned) traffic: +4.8%
- Organic Shopping traffic: -33.3% (due to Merchant Center instability)
Revenue & Engagement Impact
Within 48 hours before reporting:
- +18% Gross Purchase Revenue from SEO
- -17.8% Bounce Rate
- +1.5% New Users
- +5.3% SEO Sessions
Despite the scale of the restructure, the project launched without any ranking or revenue losses—highlighting the effectiveness of pre-launch planning and QA.
What’s Next for This Client
To build on this early success, we’ve outlined the following post-launch initiatives:
- Segment XML sitemaps for improved crawl management
- Redirect remaining legacy /education URLs
- Conduct technical SEO and content audit for the off-site educational domain
- Sunset the comparison feature with SEO-preserving strategies
- Resolve legacy Google Search Console errors
- Complete migration of product URLs to clean, extension-free paths
- Monitor and improve organic shopping traffic via Merchant Center
- Identify and fix recent Core Web Vitals issues (LCP, CLS)
Navigating AI Search Disruption
The client’s site is also navigating the emerging impact of Google’s AI Overviews. Industry data shows:
- Average organic traffic loss: ~4%
With educational content now isolated on a separate domain, the team can more precisely track and respond to this evolving trend.
Conclusion
This Nav-Taxonomy overhaul set a new benchmark for technical SEO migrations. By implementing clean URLs, strong internal linking, and a future-proof content structure, the client saw immediate improvements in rankings, traffic, and revenue. Most importantly, the business now has a scalable SEO foundation to support ongoing growth, adapt to AI-driven changes in search behavior, and deliver a clearer user experience across its commercial and educational platforms.
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