Penfolds SEO Migration Case Study
From zero to 11,000+ monthly organic visitors: Launching Penfolds into the US search market
This is how we migrated one of Australia's most iconic wine brands from Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Shopify while shifting from a subfolder to a standalone subdomain, then built an organic growth program from scratch.
The Client
Penfolds is one of Australia's most recognised wine brands globally, owned by Treasury Wine Estates (TWE). Their US ecommerce operation is a critical growth market, with the US site contributing roughly one-fifth of overall Penfolds web traffic. The brand sells premium wines from the accessible Koonunga Hill range through to the iconic Grange, which commands significant collector interest in the American market.
The Challenge
This wasn't a straightforward platform migration. Penfolds needed to move their US ecommerce site from Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Shopify, but the complexity went well beyond a standard replatform.
The US site was shifting from a subfolder structure (penfolds.com/en-us/) to a standalone subdomain (us.penfolds.com). In SEO terms, this is essentially launching a new domain. Google treats subdomains as separate entities, meaning the US site would need to build authority independently rather than leaning on the parent domain.
The legacy site had accumulated years of technical debt. XML sitemaps were incomplete, redirects were inconsistent, and there was significant overlap between Australian and US content with broken international targeting signals. Google was confused about which version of the site to show US searchers. And with the US representing about 20% of overall traffic, the downside of a botched migration was disproportionately high.
The Strategy
- Redirect architecture: We audited every legacy URL and built comprehensive redirect mapping for over 300 priority pages. Shopify's native redirect functionality has limitations for long-tail SKU-based URLs, so we designed a dual-layer solution combining Cloudflare regex rules at the edge with Shopify's built-in redirects for precision page-to-page mappings. This gave us both scale and accuracy.
- International targeting: We implemented a complete hreflang and canonical framework addressing AU/US content overlap directly. Every page references its counterpart in the other market with clear canonical signals preventing duplicate content issues. The framework was designed to scale as TWE potentially expands to additional regional stores.
- Growth program: Once the migration was stable, we shifted from risk management to growth. This included US-specific metadata templates targeting American wine buyer search behaviour, structured content around collections and gifting queries, seasonal optimisation around holiday peaks and release windows, and ongoing cross-market monitoring to prevent cannibalisation.
The Results
The growth trajectory speaks for itself. From a standing start in October 2025, us.penfolds.com has built to over 11,000 estimated monthly organic visitors by February 2026. Four months from zero to a meaningful organic presence in one of the world's most competitive luxury goods markets.
The site ranks for over 200 keywords in the US, with more than 120 in the top 3. Penfolds holds the #1 spot for its core brand terms and product-specific queries like "penfolds bin 28" and "penfolds koonunga hill". Traffic value continues to climb with accelerating momentum rather than plateauing.
The migration was completed without disruption. No indexation issues, no redirect loops, no cross-market cannibalisation. The frameworks we built now form a repeatable migration playbook for Treasury Wine Estates' broader portfolio.
Why It Worked
Complex migrations fail when SEO is treated as a post-launch fix. We were involved from the earliest planning stages, working alongside the development team to ensure every technical decision considered organic search implications. The dual-layer redirect approach solved a genuine platform limitation rather than accepting a compromise.
There was no "recovery period" of lost traffic to claw back. The site launched with clean architecture, correct international signals, and optimised templates ready to capture US search demand from day one. For a premium brand entering a competitive international market, that's exactly the kind of result that justifies embedding SEO into the migration from the start.
Planning a platform migration?
We've managed migrations for some of Australia's biggest brands, from Shopify to Salesforce and everything in between. If you're moving platforms and don't want to lose the organic traffic you've spent years building, talk to us first.
