The Challenge
Cake Square is one of Chennai's most popular bakery chains, operating 30+ outlets across the city and offering an extensive catalogue of cakes, pastries, and baked goods through both physical stores and online ordering.
The brand had been running its e-commerce site on cakesquarechennaionline.com, a long domain that hurt brand recall and looked unprofessional for a chain of their scale. The existing website needed a complete redesign to handle the product catalogue breadth, multi-location store information, and growing online order volumes. SEO and social media were being managed by a small remote team based in Kolkata.
The old domain had genuine search equity. In its final weeks of operation (February 2025), it was generating approximately strong daily click volume and significant daily impressions, with hundreds of keywords ranking and several branch-specific terms already in the top 2. This was not a neglected domain with nothing to lose.
What We Did
Domain Migration & Technical Foundation
The migration from cakesquarechennaionline.com to cakesquare.com was executed on February 20, 2025. We mapped and implemented comprehensive URL redirections from the old domain to the corresponding pages on the new site, with each redirect individually verified to point to the correct destination page rather than defaulting to the homepage, which is a common shortcut that wastes accumulated link equity.
The technical SEO foundation was built simultaneously with the website redesign: proper schema markup across product, category, and location pages, XML sitemaps for hundreds of product URLs, canonical tags to prevent duplicate content across similar product variations, and a clean URL structure designed for both search engines and human readability.
Page speed was a priority in the new build. Over the engagement period, mobile page speed scores improved by 50% and desktop scores by 81%. Bounce rate dropped significantly, with a 40% reduction indicating the new site was delivering better user experience and content relevance.
Product-Level SEO at Scale
Bakery e-commerce SEO requires optimization at the individual product level, not just at the homepage or category level. Cake Square's catalogue includes hundreds of products spanning categories like birthday cakes, wedding cakes, anniversary cakes, theme cakes, photo cakes, fondant cakes, bento cakes, and more. Each product page represents a distinct search opportunity.
The Results
Within three months of the new domain going live, during the seasonal off-season when bakery search demand is at its lowest:
Keyword Rankings Built from a Standing Start
The new domain launched on February 20 with zero search history. By May 31:
1,000+ keywords were ranking in Google search. hundreds of keywords had reached the top 10 positions. hundreds of keywords were in the top 3 positions. More than hundreds of keywords held the #1 position.
Key Takeaway
Domain migrations are typically measured by how well they preserve existing traffic. The industry expectation is to minimize losses and recover to previous levels within 6-12 months. Recovering 97% of top-3 keyword positions and 81% of top-10 positions within three months, during the seasonal trough, significantly beats that timeline. The fact that month-over-month impressions were accelerating (52% growth March to April, 124% April to May) rather than plateauing indicated the remaining recovery was on track to complete well ahead of the typical 6-12 month window.
