Client Overview: heine
Heinrich Heine GmbH is a leading provider of current fashion and inspiring interior design ideas. The Karlsruhe-based company translates the latest trends from the areas of fashion and living with a high quality of advice tailored to the discerning woman who values her individuality.
heine has been a trademark of the Witt Group, a company of the Otto Group, since December 2019.
At heine, customers can order goods from Germany through online shops in five European countries; Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Netherlands and France.
The Bottom Line
“Deepcrawl Automation Hub is a very reliable tool. We used the Automation Hub, for example, to check if anything is redirecting where it shouldn’t be. Before, I had to check everything manually but, with the Automation Hub, you can set up tests beforehand and really see what happens. It’s a great relief to know there is something that will notify me if anything has changed.”
— Sebastian Simon, Senior SEO Manager, heine
“Yet another tool added to an existing tool set is always something to consider carefully. But when Sebastian told me about Deepcrawl Automation Hub, I was convinced immediately. It is a huge time saver in spotting errors and can save you real money when site errors are not deployed because of it.”
— Holger Stripf, Head of Department Online Marketing – Senior Manager, heine
The Challenge
With multiple sites and traffic of over 1M impressions per month, heine’s biggest SEO concern is that important content goes missing, will be uncrawlable or they noindex pages by mistake.
heine has a small, but organised, team of developers that run 2 week sprints using Jenkins for deployment and testing across the 5 sites. They compare their changes on test instances of the website with the current production version to ensure that no changes have been made to the main functionality of the website (cart, ordering process, menu etc.) that were not desired.
Following the development checks, heine SEO (Sebastian Simon) checks if anything is broken from a SEO perspective. This is a time consuming process that involves a great deal of manual checks.
The Solution
heine implemented Deepcrawl Automation Hub as a release control mechanism in order to avoid deploying code that could harm their sites. They integrated the Automation Hub with Jenkins and set up notifications via email.
The initial set up was configured to issue a warning only rather than stopping deployment and tests were being run to determine, for example, if a shop category had been renamed without the SEOs knowledge – doing so triggers a redirect.
The Results
heine has so far run over 1,000 tests across their eight test suites. 18% of these tests issued a warning and each build had at least one failed test! The current average across Automation Hub users is 33%.
Fortunately, these can be easily identified, prioritized and fixed before code goes live.
In the future heine hopes to use the Automation Hub during its site migration project.
