Walmart

Taking on 100,000,000 pages of Walmart.com  From an SEO standpoint was exhilarating. Yeah, we did it. Successfully. 

It took detective work, working cross-functionally, and it took persistence. It took the courage to know it could be done, if we set our mind to it. 

After all we have never refused a challenge.

Upon arriving at Walmart as the SEO Manager of Walmart.com. It was time to dig in.  Full On SEO Audit. Silicon Valley Portals style.  After 3 months of immersion, I arrived at several conclusions and decided to take the bull by the horns and execute the Largest "Needle Moving" SEO changes as fast as possible, while tackling Low hanging fruit simultaneously.  I had realized there were 100 Million products in the company catalogue, but site:walmart.com yielded only 18 million results, and I could not accept that this was ok. It had been left this way for 3 to 4 years. No one wanted to touch the project it was too massive an undertaking to do and no one even realized this was an issue.  I surfaced the issue and began working with the head of SEO engineering to rebuild 2500 sitemaps of 50,000 URLs a piece.  Cleaning up 302 redirects, 301 redirected URLs in sitemaps, and broken URL links made sure all sitemaps were built properly and according to best practices for 6 months.  Then came the next 3-month battle to get google to crawl it all.

Persistence, determination, and unrelenting determination to take this to the finish line and we solved it.  Rotation. the Key was rotation at that scale. We rotated the Sitemaps through the robots.txt surfacing sitemaps with URLs we didn't see crawled and indexed. Validating along the way, until we got them all crawled and all indexed.  

The Results were Explosive, in a matter of a week we indexed 80 Million pages. Instead of the original 18 million.  Meaning now all Walmarts products were finally in Google organically searchable to be purchased.  

Sales went off the charts, up and to the right. By my Calculations, we were on target to do a $1.5 billion increase in sales per year. Success. The sweet smell of success. We danced the dance of joy.

Fun Fact:  the Meta Tags you see on Walmart.com are still the words I put there myself. My homepage optimization of Walmart.com was so strong it has survived the test of time.

Challenge

SEO Optimization of Walmart.com

Solution

1: Rebuilding of All sitemaps of 100,000,000 Pages. 

2: Taking control of Meta tags of Walmart.com via homemade Page editing tool. 

Results

Increase of $1.5 Billion / SEO Revenue Annually.

From The Client

“These guys have built such a strong relationship with our organization that we consider them an extension of our IT department. We always know that excellent service is just a phone call or e-mail away and that we will receive the same level of attention they always provide that makes us feel like we're their top priority.”