Between 2019 and 2020, I served as the technical SEO consultant for The Pokémon Company International through AKQA/WPP. The scope was unlike anything I had worked on before: over 1 million URLs, 32 countries, 11 languages, and a complete site redesign that needed to preserve one of the most valuable organic search footprints in entertainment.
The version of pokemon.com that is live today is the redesign I consulted on. You can verify the technical SEO foundations on the live site right now — the hreflang implementation, the URL architecture, the structured data. That level of verifiability is rare in this industry, and it is something I take seriously.
The challenge: redesigning a 1MM+ URL site without losing rankings
Site redesigns are where most companies lose their organic traffic. I have seen it happen repeatedly throughout my my career in SEO — a company invests in a beautiful new design, launches it without proper SEO migration planning, and watches their traffic crater by 40-60% overnight. With Pokémon, the stakes were enormous. The existing site had massive organic authority built up over years, and the redesign had to preserve every bit of it while simultaneously improving the technical foundation.
The core challenges included URL mapping across 32 country-specific subdirectories, each with its own content variations. The hreflang implementation alone was one of the most complex I have ever worked on — every page needed to correctly signal its language and regional targeting to Google across all 32 versions. A single error in the hreflang matrix could cause Google to serve the wrong country’s content in search results, or worse, to ignore the signals entirely.
The technical audit process
Before any design work began, I conducted a comprehensive technical SEO audit of the existing site. This is the approach I use for every engagement — the methodology scales, but the rigor does not change.
The audit covered crawl efficiency and budget allocation across the 1MM+ URL corpus, identifying which URLs were consuming crawl budget without contributing to organic performance. For a site of this scale, crawl budget optimization is not optional — it directly determines how quickly Google discovers and indexes new content.
I mapped the entire URL architecture, documenting every redirect chain, every canonical tag, and every instance of duplicate or near-duplicate content. On a multi-regional site like Pokémon, canonicalization becomes complex because you have legitimately similar content across regions that needs to remain indexed separately. If your canonical tags contradict your hreflang tags, Google resolves the conflict unpredictably. I have seen this exact issue take down traffic on major sites.
Structured data implementation was another critical component. For an entertainment brand with thousands of character pages, game pages, and media pages, JSON-LD schema needed to accurately represent the entity relationships between content. This is the same structured data methodology I now apply to ecommerce SEO engagements — the entity types differ, but the principle of making your content machine-parsable is universal.
Migration execution: what actually matters
The redesign launched with a 301 redirect map covering every URL that had organic value. With 1MM+ URLs across 32 country subdirectories, the redirect logic needed to be implemented at the server level with pattern-based URL transformations, not just one-to-one mappings.
We implemented pre-launch crawl testing using staging environments to verify that every redirect resolved correctly, that no redirect chains exceeded two hops, and that the new URL structure maintained proper canonicalization. Post-launch, I monitored Google Search Console daily for the first 60 days, watching for crawl errors, indexation drops, and hreflang validation issues.
The result was a clean migration with no significant traffic loss — which, for a site of this scale, is the equivalent of landing a commercial airplane on a carrier deck.
What I learned consulting for Disney, Mailchimp, and US Soccer
The Pokémon engagement was part of a broader period consulting on technical SEO for several major brands — Disney and Clorox brand properties through AKQA/WPP, plus Mailchimp and US Soccer redesigns through Emotive.io. Each engagement reinforced the same core principles.
First, technical SEO is not a checklist. Every site has a unique technical environment — the CMS, the hosting infrastructure, the CDN, the JavaScript rendering pipeline, the internationalization requirements. The consultant’s job is to understand the specific environment deeply enough to identify the constraints and opportunities unique to that site.
Second, the biggest technical SEO wins are almost always invisible to the end user. The visitor never sees the hreflang tag, the canonical tag, or the structured data. But these invisible foundations determine whether the site ranks. I have seen sites with beautiful content and strong backlinks fail because their technical foundation was broken in ways only visible in a crawl log.
Third, Core Web Vitals and page speed matter, but they matter less than most SEO content would have you believe. In my experience across dozens of enterprise engagements, fixing crawl issues, resolving canonicalization conflicts, and implementing proper structured data moves the needle far more than shaving 200ms off your LCP. Page speed is a tiebreaker. Technical architecture is the game.
How this applies to your business
You do not need to be a Fortune 500 to benefit from enterprise-grade technical SEO. The same methodology I applied to Pokémon’s 1MM+ URLs applies to a 500-page ecommerce site or a 50-page professional services site. The scale changes. The fundamentals do not.
If your site has been through a redesign and lost traffic, there are almost certainly redirect issues, canonicalization conflicts, or crawl efficiency problems that can be identified and fixed. If you are planning a redesign, the technical SEO audit should happen before any design work — not after launch when the damage is done.
The technical SEO work I did for Pokémon, Disney, Mailchimp, US Soccer, and BigCommerce is the same work I do for every client at SERP Masters. The live versions of these sites are verification that the methodology works at the highest level.