Getting Website Migrations Right

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show, where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now, here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Welcome to the SEO show. It's been a couple of weeks, but we are back. And today we're in the studio again for the first time in how many months, five months about yeah. Since June ended June. Yeah. Good to be back. It is good. It's kind of weird. Like as you were saying, we've got these mics in our face. We're actually making eye contact and looking at each other right now.

ARTHUR: We did that with the virtual online streams, I guess. Yeah. It's yeah. It's different.

MICHAEL: It's a less intense version of eye contact when you're doing it through the screen share. That's true. But hopefully we sound much better today with the nice mics and everything we've got here because we're talking about something pretty important. We are talking about website migrations today because this is a minefield. If you don't get a website migration right when you're changing from an old site to a new one, you can lose traffic, sales, revenue, all sorts of bad things can happen, right?

ARTHUR: Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. You can lose your rankings. Yep. It can go pear shaped very quickly.

MICHAEL: And it does happen enough to be a pretty common thing that we run into. So we thought today we'd basically just walk you through the process we go through when we're migrating a website. And if you stick to this, chances are you're probably going to have a pretty good experience.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I actually have a few migrations on the go at the moment for a few clients.

MICHAEL: So successful.

ARTHUR: I know they're still on the go, basically. So we're mapping out URLs and we're halfway through.

MICHAEL: Well, okay. You'll be able to talk really from a place of experience.

ARTHUR: I would hope so.

MICHAEL: All right. Well, look, what we'll do is we'll just sort of run through the process from where to go or go to where I always get that saying the wrong way around, which one go to where I've never heard that saying. I'm full of these old, old man. Go to where it's like when you ride a horse and you go go and then, Whoa. Yeah. I never heard that one. Okay. Well, anyway, we're going to go from go to woe with the process we use. So let's go from the start. You have a new website. Well, actually let's frame it. Let's say you're on a really weird, you're on PrestaShop or OpenCart as a CMS and you want to move to Shopify. So in this case, you have your designs done for Shopify. You've got the wireframes. What are we doing from an SEO point of view at that point, you know, from a, I guess, a migration and SEO point of view to make sure that the wireframes and the designs are okay.

ARTHUR: Basically just making sure, I mean, it's still very early on in the migration process, but making sure that they have factored in places for SEO content, making sure that the nav is, you know, set up properly. So just having a look at the designs and making sure that they tick all the right boxes. It's hard to tell with just wireframes and design sometimes. It's better when you have a staging site where they've actually started building it out. But yeah, first stages is to have a look and make sure that all the SEO, you know, H1s, content boxes, all that are included in the designs.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And so the general thing we like to preach is involve your SEO agency or consultant in the process as early as possible. If you're going to be moving websites, don't wait till the site is built. Try and involve them because they might have input on what can be done to work in all of the stuff Arthur's just covered off there. But I guess from a migration point of view, let's assume that the designs are done, you've got your new site all ready to be migrated. The first thing we're going to do as SEOs is jump in our trusty friend Google Analytics and really audit it and have a look at what's going on there.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So one of the main questions I get from clients is which pages should I move across to the new site? And the simple answer is, you know, pages that get SEO traffic. That's all we care about, basically. So using analytics to have a look at the last 6 to 12 months of traffic data and picking the pages that were driving the most traffic, making sure that they're moved across. Using Ahrefs as well to see which pages have referring domains pointing to them to make sure that those pages are redirected somewhere to the new site and having a look at which pages actually rank for valuable keywords. So I like to create an Excel document, a matrix type document where I have all the URLs, the organic traffic, the target keywords and the number of referring domains. And that way at a glance, you can basically find which pages are valuable and which pages you can potentially call during the migration.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So that's your sort of, yep. You must keep your hit list of stuff that you really want to focus on. Um, I would add to that, you know, you, you, you look at, um, analytics, you look at IHS, you should crawl the site with screaming frog as well, or a tool like that and get a list of all of the pages on it.

ARTHUR: Yep.

MICHAEL: and sort of, I guess, overlay that with the data that you've got with the ranking domains and traffic and all the rest of it. And so you can sort of see here are all the important pages. Maybe there's a whole bunch of stuff here that may not even need to be kept. And that's something that you decide later on. But yeah, you want to be working in a spreadsheet. You don't want to just sort of be looking at analytics and going, oh, well, I'll probably keep those ones, but you're not really planning it out. Definitely need to plan it out. Absolutely. And I guess what you can do then once you've got that spreadsheet, probably need to do the same or you probably want to export the pages on the new site, right? Or the URL structure on the new site.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So even before that, it's good to get a site map of sorts or any, I mean, before that they should know what pages they're going to be creating, but if they haven't provided that yet, crawling the staging site and getting a list of all the URLs on the new site, So you can start mapping them out.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And see with migration, sometimes when you change sites, the URLs will change. Other times they don't, you know, so you need to factor that into your planning. You know, if URLs aren't really changing, it does make things a bit easier. But if you're moving to a new CMS with a new domain with all new URLs, that's when you really need to have all your ducks in a row and make sure that you've got it mapped out, you know, both sites. But we're talking about mapping out what, what, what is the process there? You know, how, how do you like to do things in that regard? Spreadsheets.

ARTHUR: Yep. Yeah. So yeah, mapping, basically having a list of all the old URLs and then another column and then all the new URLs and just filtering out using different, I guess, formulas and things like that to speed it up and just finding the most relevant page to migrate the old URL to the new URL to your new URL. Um,

MICHAEL: Cause it's, it's, um, it's the process of, cause some pages will have a like for like, but if you're culling some or whatever, you might need to redirect some of the pages to like the most relevant one, like a product page to a category page, for example, if, if you're getting rid of that product on the new site.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Which is why I like to have them side by side to start off with. And you can use different formulas. You can, you know, strip certain, paths from the URL just to find the right page. The little things that I do that speed it up for me that I've been doing for a long time, which I can't remember off the top of my head how to explain exactly, but in my head it makes sense.

MICHAEL: Oh, that's good. Glad it makes sense there. What about our metadata? Do you do that like before it goes up to the site? Do you map that out in your mapping document? Yeah, in the mapping document.

ARTHUR: So I'd have the page title for the old, sorry. Yeah. For the old page. And then you'd want to move it across to the new URL you're redirecting to. So keeping it more or less the same. Yep. Yep. Probably more the same than less, but.

MICHAEL: Yeah. All right. So that's all I guess it's that's all the planning stage, right? It's all done in the Excel doc. You haven't gone anywhere near a website and server at this point. Right. What happens next normally in your process?

ARTHUR: Um, what happens next? So basically, you know, once the site's ready, you would make sure and review the site. So you'd make sure that all the metadata has been added to the website, page titles, all the right headings are added to the pages that there's copy on the pages, just giving it a thorough once over and making sure that, um, it's all there basically before they start, you know, putting in the redirects and flicking the switch. So making sure that it's all set up, ready to go. You don't want to be redirecting the site before all that's added to the site because then you'll see a drop in traffic. So just going through the whole site, auditing it and making sure that it's, yeah.

MICHAEL: content metadata, all that stuff. The other thing you wanna make sure your robots file is ready to go for the new site.

ARTHUR: You know what, sorry to interrupt you, big one there, making sure that when you launch the site, you un-tick the block this website from appearing in the search results in WordPress. So many times I've had a client migrate a site and forget to un-tick that box and their traffic would just tank because it's being no index basically. So yeah.

MICHAEL: Well, I guess that sort of is the same point here as with your robots file, you want to make sure when you move to the new site, if there are parts of that new site that you don't want Google finding, so things like maybe login pages or random pages on your website that are maybe more for internal purposes or your terms of service, if you want to keep them out of the index, making sure that they're blocked in the robots file and that you have no index tags in place on those pages on the new site before you, as you said, flick the switch. Because once you do flick the switch and Google comes to it, it'll very quickly find all the pages and index them. So you want to prevent it from finding stuff that you don't want it to find. Exactly. So once that's all in place, It is just a process of applying the redirects, right? Setting up your, however you're going to do it, HT access or whether it's used on the- In the plugin in WordPress. Yeah, exactly. What I like to do, you know, obviously with the mapping, it's a one-to-one redirects and then you might be mapping products to a category page, you know, doing some sort of a catch-all redirect at the end, where if a page hasn't been redirected to another one, it gets redirected to the homepage or something like that, just to make sure that there's no, little gaps in what you've done, any holes, so that if people happen to find their way to an old page on the old site, they end up on the new site. So once that's all in place, you probably want to test it all, make sure it's all working, you know, from a visual or a human-based check. Then it's time to get Google involved, right?

ARTHUR: Yeah. So getting Google involved, which means basically going into search console, re-verifying the domain, adding the new sitemap and then just monitoring it to make sure that there are no crawl errors, no 404s, no issues that arise. So basically checking in every, every day. Google will notify you if there are any issues, but yeah, just be, I guess, diligent and make sure that's all working.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And you'd like to crawl the old site, right? Make sure the 301s are in place.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So having a list of all the audio URLs, going back into screaming frog into list mode, crawling them to make sure that the three ones are there. If anything's missed, then we can address it ASAP.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So that's very comprehensive process really. Like you're doing a couple at the moment, they're going to go without any hits, right? They're going to be perfect because if you do this, you're not really going to miss anything. Yeah. The only thing really in this case is what does Google think of the new site? Exactly.

ARTHUR: You can't control. You never know what can happen. I mean, if you get the fundamentals right, in theory, you shouldn't run into too many problems. We can't guarantee there isn't going to be a drop in traffic because there's a lot of variables outside of our control. You never know how Google is going to react to the new code on a website, the server, different things that can impact. Load speed might be different. Load speed, yeah, exactly. So there is a small risk that rankings can drop. Usually if we see a drop, we kind of see it rebound. So yeah.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So look, what we've covered here is basically it just gives you a solid foundation for your migration, like the best chance of success. No one can guarantee what, you know, it is a risky thing to migrate from one website to another.

ARTHUR: Especially if you're going from one domain, different domains. So a lot of people rebrand and then they'll change their site. So you're not only changing the URL structure, but the actual domain, which can be problematic sometimes. Yeah.

MICHAEL: So it's never guaranteed that you'll remain the same traffic-wise. You might drop. Sometimes you go better. You get more traffic. But if you address your migration in the way we've covered there, following that general process, it's not going to be a problem with the migration that causes a drop. It's just Google recalibrating with your site. And maybe in a couple of months time with a bit more link building or time for the dust to settle, so to speak, you normally find that traffic comes back anyway. Exactly. So that's basically the redirect site migration process. Redirect site migration or just site migration process? Website migration process. That we like to go through. It is a minefield. There has been, you know, sometimes, sometimes, you know, worst case scenarios, clients might just launch a whole new site without any of this stuff being done, right? And that happens, yeah. Yeah. You're scrambling because you don't have the crawl of the old URLs and, you know, you've got to try and do things retrospectively.

ARTHUR: Yeah. That's not the way. No, ideally you want a couple of months notice so you can plan everything out.

MICHAEL: Properly. Yeah, absolutely. Probably one thing we didn't cover off, which we should have in making sure GTM analytics and everything is set up.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Making sure the code that was on the old site is set up on the new site or the goals and things like that events.

MICHAEL: Yep. Cause moving to a new site is a good opportunity to have a look at that site and think about the actions you should be tracking. So your main goals like, you know, um, lead submission forms being submitted revenue. Yeah. But then secondary goals, maybe, um, people clicking on contact buttons on the side or downloading a brochure, you can sort of plan all that stuff out and make sure all the tracking's in place before you even move over to the site. So we didn't cover that, but that's something that should be done as well. But anyway, that's about it. Let's keep it short and sweet today for our first episode back. Hope you found that useful. We'll be back next week with another episode of the SEO show until then. Feel free to drop us a review or a comment wherever you're listening to this and we'll see you next week.