Habitat: Migrating a complex site - Organic

Habitat store showcasing modern furniture and home decor items.

Service and project type

Site Migration

Relationship

We’ve worked with the Sainsbury’s Group for the past five years on their Natural Search. Sainsbury’s now own Habitat, after acquiring them in 2016. We began working with Habitat because they wanted to migrate their existing site and considerably slim down their range.

Problem

Around the time of the acquisition, Habitat was closing stores and prioritising their online sales, resulting in a huge change in what they sold and stock volumes. It also meant a new focus on their search experience as critical to the continued success of the brand.

A new focus on dramatically stripped back core lines of homewares brought with it challenges. Ranking for items they no longer sold would cause disjointed and negative customer journeys from search, which could cause issues with visibility and search performance.

Our challenge was to mitigate the impact of migration as much as possible to counteract these threats.

Solution

We worked with Habitat to analyse the possible effects of the migration, including long term losses of search performance due to the removal of large numbers of categories and products from the site.

From there, we worked with the team to understand what ‘good’ looked like with the new range, and developed the action plan required to protect the site and ensure they delivered a better search experience for their customers. After the initial migration, we moved on to a BAU retainer to help them recover their visibility losses.

Results

After 12 months, the site has seen nothing but growth since the initial migration hit. Considering two-thirds of all products were removed the outcome has been hugely successful.

Immediate post-migration visibility rose by 17%
Two years post-migration the site has its highest visibility ever, with a 45% increase in visibility from pre-migration.