Successful 20+ Site Migration for Osprey

Working with Osprey 

Osprey is a leading, affordable luxury brand, specialising in outerwear such as backpacks. They approached us seeking a complex site migration which included over 20 websites that needed to be migrated or consolidated into fewer markets. For example, Luxembourg French into a generic French website. 

The Challenge

As all of Osprey’s websites were in English, they approached us to support and execute a major translation project alongside the migration to ensure all the URLs and Metadata were available in the local language for core markets including DE, FR, IT, ES, SV, and FI. At the same time, Osprey conducted a site re-design that prioritised search.

With that in mind, our aim was to:

1. Consolidate the EU site into the .com and 14 markets that sit in the .com root domain into 6 markets
2. Translate URLs and Metadata into the local language to target a higher volume of keywords
3. Improve SEO elements as part of the site re-design, including page speed and key on-page ranking factors

Following the migration, we were tasked with the following:

• Coming off the back of a migration from a ospreyeurope.com domain to the holistic, primary domain osprey.com across 14 sites
• Localisation of URLs across 6 local language markets
• Improving on-site targeting 
• Fixing foundational configuration issues
• Resolving international cannibalisation
• Defining a long-term content strategy

Our Strategy

We initially conducted a comprehensive redirect map of all 20+ markets, including historical URLs to pass existing authority to the new site. As part of the site consolidation, we combined the backlink profile of ospreyeurope.com with the osprey.com domain via 301 redirects to enable all markets to sit on a primary domain. We also carried out redirect testing in staging and again post launch to resolve any possible errors and 404s in a timely manner and implemented hreflang to improve targeting and support the pages rank in relevant markets. This involved removing products, categories and content that was low value.

Following the migration, we were able to:

• Implement a full suite of hreflang across all sites, including the unmanaged (by NOVOS) U.S. site
• Implement a renewed and updated Geo-IP Pop-Up and integrate relative internal linking between the sites
• Carry out holistic optimisation across 4 markets on all key category pages, improving keyword targeting, language selection and internal linking
• Conduct category expansion across 4 markets, inclusive of localisation to go after a wider selection of competitive keywords for which Osprey should dominate, but didn't
• Remedy the Client-side rendering reliance to implement a more integrated server-side version
• Conduct full site wide optimisation of meta-data and retargeting
• Commence mid-funnel and post-conversion longer-form content