SEO & Migration

Organic search is 26.5% of sessions but 50.3% of online revenue ($85,003 over 12 months, GA4). The migration has to protect it.

Baseline

Performance

Search visibility

English Gardens ranks top 20 in Detroit for 3 of 183 major non-branded terms, all on the home page. 94% of ranking www keywords land on the home page (noindex elsewhere).

Local pack

Google Business Profiles

All 6 store profiles link to the home page. No "Landscaper" category; Eastpointe and Plymouth lack "Florist".

Competitors

Opportunities

Striking distance (positions 4–20)

Christmas

"christmas trees": 40,500/mo in Nov–Dec (Detroit); organic top 10 is all national retailers.

Demand by keyword (Detroit, monthly)

Plant database

Recommendation: keep the vendor (NetPS Plant Finder) and integrate it. Get the noindex removed now; add per-plant "Shop this plant" and store links. No migration at launch.

Traffic is mostly national: ~20,600/mo est., at most ~1,460 (7%) local.
Every top plant page is noindex, most likely inherited from the WordPress header NetPS wraps.
No path to a sale: 0 of 100 top pages link to a product, category or store.
Content is syndicated to 181 NetPS clients; English Gardens still ranks top 10 in Detroit for 29 of the top 50 plants.

Would change the call: NetPS can't remove the noindex or add per-plant links → rebuild stocked plants on www with 301s. Cost outweighs ~1,460 local visits/mo → retire and 301 to categories. Open questions: Q-16.

Top plant pages

Doorway pages

Location × product pages (e.g. /9-foot-artificial-christmas-trees-mi, /where-to-buy-boxwoods-in-royal-oak), linked from a block at the bottom of the home page.

Pages

Sessions

Revenue

Google clicks

Recommendation: retire them. Over 12 months they drew 1.0% of sessions (7,519 of 749,127), 0.1% of revenue ($171 of $169,157) and 1.0% of Google clicks (1,264 of 129,186).

Remove the home-page link block.
301 each URL to its closest category or store page.
Christmas store × city pages (the strongest group) fold into the Christmas hub and the 6 store pages.
/landscape-supplies-mi (2,586 sessions; a menu target) becomes the new Mulch & Soil category.

Redirect strategy

Use one-hop 301s from every changed URL to its closest equivalent. No redirect chains.
Collapse the known duplicates: /birding-2/, /landscape-supplies-mi/, /garden-club-membership-category/, /locations-8/ and /english-gardens-consultations/ each redirect to one canonical URL. The final canonical for each comes from the traffic data.
Keep product and category URLs unchanged wherever possible.
Manage redirects in the Redirection plugin (already installed; holds today's redirects).
After launch: watch GSC 404s, re-crawl, compare with the baseline.

Migration map

Draft by rule; targets marked TBD depend on the new category tree. Covers crawled URLs only: 508 of 4,289 published products are linked or in the sitemap; the rest need a WooCommerce product export. Full map: TBD: Sheet tab link

URLs mapped

Ranking URLs

1,230 of 1,267 ranking URLs are plant-finder pages: no redirects needed if the vendor stays.