New Magento Parts-Finder Website Optimizes SEO and Large Data Volume

Is your business outgrowing your website? Then you might be facing this question soon - how do you migrate a website with extensive data? We provide a case study with this very issue. Let’s look at Drive Solutions, a company that sells aftermarket hard drives, data transfer kits and computer memory cards to private and public parties across the globe.

With the old website showing signs of archaic design, poor SEO results and slow speeds, Drive Solutions was failing to connect their message of a modern, tech-savvy, and customer-focused business.

It takes a second, but let’s imagine for a moment, every computer manufacturer, desktop, laptop, and hard-drive that is operating inside homes and businesses. That amounts to 50-60 thousand computer models that Drive Solutions needs data on to match products with a customer’s computer.

This amount of data was not the concern; it was how piecemeal the data was stored on their website to no fault of their own. At times, owners simply outgrow their technology.

Our solution? A parts-finder website to update their way of storing data, making it easier for users to find what they were looking for, and receive prompt answers to their searches.

Their website was affecting brand messaging, disrupting marketing goals and taking a toll on sales. The design of the site was a hard sell for anybody who didn’t know Drives Solution’s previous 24 years in business. Their company’s character is knowledgeable and trustworthy, but their website screamed uncertainty for potential customers. The visual appeal of the site did not reflect the identity of the company.

In the development of the new parts-finder website, there were specific SEO drawbacks to deal with. With the previous data sets, when customers went to search engines to find answers to computer parts, Drive Solutions’ products wouldn’t always match customers’ search queries.

This negative experience was affecting external and internal searches. A sign that product data was mis-categorized. Although there was plenty of product data that needed to be restructured, some URL pages on the site were still helping conversion rates. Therefore, we wanted to maintain those pages because of their proven success.

Ultimately, all  user-experience (UE) issues are severely important, but few are more noticeable than a slow website. A slow website equates to an unpleasant experience for users and hurts organic SEO rankings for any company.

To solve the problems, data spreadsheets from the previous website needed to be customized and transferred to the new Magento website. Because pre-existing data wasn’t matching available store products to the customer’s search, the existing data needed to be reworked. This meant taking spreadsheets with about fifty columns of data and restructuring them to designate which drives fit on what computer models. 

An AMASTY plug-in was introduced and customized for the site after properly restructuring data to match products with desired categories. The Parts Finder extension better defined the relationship between the computer models and the parts category they belonged to. This helped to load the correct products that live inside each category when being searched.

With over 5000 products now organized to match the 50-60 thousand computer models, searches placed within the website result in faster and more accurate responses for customers. Having properly categorized data not only triggers better results inside the website but also improves search engine results by matching products for a specific computer model. This is possible because product data inside the website is organized and more easily located by search engines. As it’s well known, more visibility online improves overall sales.

Another part of empowering their SEO capabilities was properly transferring URLs that had good conversion rates. A lot of the previous URLs were replaced with updated versions, but some links remained the same to keep positive SEO ranking history tied to the website. The transfer of pre-existing URL data needed to be redirected to the new landing pages to keep the positive SEO results. This included computer manufacturer data that could be tied together with the client’s products being offered in the original URL.

Last, to make the site more unique, Drive Solutions wanted prices not to show for highly discounted products so we added an extension to meet their requirement. This extension replaced the price with a courteous message to call for the price instead. Adding this new extension made it possible to offer lower prices and increase engagement with discount-minded shoppers. Making this feature available also allowed for future promotions and partnerships with manufacturers to extend discount prices while increasing customer loyalty and sales.

In summary, Drive Solutions overcame the tech hurdle of a lagging website by upgrading to a Magento parts-finder website, remapping and transitioning data while leveraging AMASTY extensions to further customize product list and details. Revamping the website highly increased the functionality for the company and their customers. Drive Solutions can now take advantage of reliable data coming to and from the website to make improvements in real-time regarding inventory, sales metrics and marketing effectiveness.