Porto E-commerce Brand Recovers Organic Revenue After Migration

Background

Casa Norte Home sold sustainably sourced furniture and decor online to Portuguese and Spanish customers. In late 2023, the team migrated from a custom platform to Shopify. Redirects were incomplete. Category URL structures changed without equivalent redirects. Within eight weeks, organic revenue fell 52 percent.

The marketing director initially focused on paid social to plug the gap. CPC inflation made that unsustainable. A technical SEO agency fixed crawl errors and redirects over three months, recovering roughly eighteen percent of lost traffic. The remaining gap pointed to damaged off-page authority.

Historical backlinks still pointed to dead URLs or redirected chains that diluted equity. Competitors in the home goods niche continued earning editorial links from design publications while Casa Norte went silent during the migration chaos.

Strategy

We combined three workstreams:

1. Link reclamation for broken references to pre-migration URLs
2. Guest post campaigns on design and sustainability blogs
3. Local SEO link building through Porto manufacturing partnership stories

Product category pages for dining furniture and bedroom collections received priority because margins and search volume aligned.

Reclamation results

Of 240 identified broken referring URLs, we recovered or redirected 91 live links within four months. Editors often updated links quickly when provided the correct destination and context about the migration.

Guest post and PR execution

Guest content focused on practical design guidance rather than product pitches. Articles like "Small dining rooms that still seat six" linked naturally to relevant category pages and a room planning guide.

Regional PR highlighted Casa Norte's partnerships with Norte region artisans. Two Porto lifestyle publications and one national sustainability outlet published features with follow links.

Results

By month eleven, organic revenue exceeded pre-migration levels by eight percent on a rolling ninety-day average. Keyword rankings in positions one through twenty increased by sixty-four terms across Portuguese and Spanish tracking sets.

The strongest new placement (DR 58) was a sustainable home trends feature linking to Casa Norte's sourcing transparency page.

Key takeaway

Technical fixes alone could not restore Casa Norte's competitive position. Rebuilding editorial relationships and reclaiming lost citations were essential complements. E-commerce brands planning migrations should budget for off-page recovery before launch, not after revenue drops force the issue.

Read E-commerce Migration Link Recovery on our blog for a checklist based on this project.

Contact us if your store lost links during a replatform.