1. © Growth Marketer Academy 2019 / PROPRIETARY & CONFIDENTIAL
Role of SEO to website migration - How to keep your
organic search performance post-website migration
Rhea Teves | Co-Founder, Annelle Digital

2. About Me
❖ Co-founder, Annelle Digital
❖ A well-rounded SEO professional accomplished in managing global and
APAC SEO projects, both from in-house and agency roles, for more than
10 years.
❖ Hands-on experience in managing regional website migration projects
❖ Former Regional SEO Lead at HSBC and has worked with companies
such as Nestle APAC, FedEx APAC and Paypal HK

3. Why SEO should be involved at the beginning of website
migration?
Website changes post-launch based on technical
SEO audit can be expensive.
BUT MAINLY, to prevent any drop in performance
resulting to business loss.

4. Why businesses need to do website migration?
1. Add or Remove pages 2. Rebranding / Domain Change
3. Site Hierarchy
Changes
Sub-category pages
Category pages
Homepage Level 0
Level 1
Level 2 Level 2
Level 1
Level 2

5. However, there are website migrations driven by SEO
http https

6. ● 4 factors to consider when optimizing your website for SEO
during website migration
● What steps to take to keep and further improve your SEO
performance?
Agenda

7. 4 factors to consider when
optimizing your website for SEO
during website migration

8. #1. Audit the website and discuss Technical
SEO requirements with developers
Ensure website is crawlable, indexable and equipped to rank
Crawl
Index
Rank
Search engine
spiders crawl the
web and discover
pages via links
Spiders learn what your
website is about through
content and index
information on database
Spiders serve the
most relevant
results based on
evaluation to online
users
To achieve that, SEO need to communicate
to developers the SEO-friendly components
and features needed to be developed within
the CMS
• Infrastructure and Components
• Site Hierarchy
• URL Structure
• Status Code and Redirects
• Robots file and XML Sitemap
• CMS functionality for on-page SEO

9. #1. Audit the website and discuss Technical
SEO requirements with developers
• Server-side rendering
• Pre-rendering
(Prerender.io)
• Additional testing by
Google URL Inspection
tool, Check DOM via
Inspect element or
View Render Source
plugin
Infrastructure and Components
• HTML 5 vs SPA
• Page loading speed
• Core Web Vitals
• Lazy loading
• Responsive Web Design with
mobile tag
• avoid using non-SEO friendly
technologies such as iframe,
thumb tabs, accordions

10. #1. Audit the website and discuss Technical
SEO requirements with developers
Organize your Site Hierarchy
• All pages and internal links are
accessible
• Taxonomy
• Navigation
• Page depth and categorization
• Sitemap
Sub-category
pages
Category
pages
Homepage Level 0
Level 1
Level 2 Level 2
Level 1
Level 2

11. #1. Audit the website and discuss Technical
SEO requirements with developers
URL Structure
https://www.annelledigital.com/services/web-development/?querystring
• http redirect to
https
• Use https for
secure site
• Non-www to redirect to www
• Avoid using sub-domain since it
can be perceived as an
independent website
• Use hyphen for individual words
to be identified
• No special character within the
static URL
• No consecutive hyphen in any
URL
• URLs must always be written in
lowercase
• Non-case sensitive and 301
redirecting to all lowercase version
• Non-trailing slash to redirect to
trailing slash
• URL ends with slash and not
accessible with extensions
(index.php, .html, .aspx)
• Avoid the use of
parameters such
as sessions IDs
to avoid duplicate
content issue

12. #1. Audit the website and discuss Technical
SEO requirements with developers
Status Code and Redirects
• 200 OK or active page
• 404 error page
• 301 (permanent redirect) and 302 (temporary
redirect)
• 5xx maintenance page
- Redirect bulk upload

13. #1. Audit the website and discuss Technical
SEO requirements with developers
Robots file and XML Sitemap
• Disallow
directives on
robots file
• Pages Sitemap
• Image Sitemap
• Video sitemap
• News sitemap
• Hreflang Sitemap

14. #1. Audit the website and discuss Technical
SEO requirements with developers
CMS Functionality for page level SEO
• Title tag
• Meta description
• Alt tag
• Heading
• Page level Hreflang tag
• Canonical tag

15. #2. Make sure you have the right tools
1 Crawling tool
2 Analytics
3
Google Search Console
4 Backlink tool
5 Ranking tool
● What are the current pages and on-page seo elements?
Tools: Screaming Frog / DeepCrawl / OnCrawl
● Website performance- pages with traffic and conversion, what channels are being used
Tools: Google Analytics / Adobe Analytics
● A free Google tool that provides reports that can help you measure your site's Search
traffic and performance, fix issues, and make your site ultimately search-engine friendly
● What are the landing pages of your website’s backlink?
Tools: Ahrefs / Majestic
● What pages have been migrated and how they are performing pre and post-migration
in terms of ranking for important keywords?
Tools: BrightEdge / Accuranker / Advanced Web Ranking

16. #3. Gather and analyze data
Step 2: What pages
that are not part of
the must-have list
are receiving the
most traffic or
bringing the most
conversion
Crawling Tool
and Analytics
Analytics,
Google Search
Console
Crawling tool,
Backlink tool,
Analytics
Google Search
Console,
Ranking tool
Step 4: Extract
the keywords
driving traffic to
the site and
pages receiving
organic traffic
and then track
Step 3: Create a list
of all the old URLs
including HTML
pages, PDF, Images,
and paid media
landing pages
Step 1: Gather a list
of active pages and
determine what are
the must-have
pages to migrate

17. #4. Retain existing website authority
Redirect pages to keep link equity
301 (permanent redirect) and 302
(temporary redirect)
Source: Moz

18. #4. Retain existing website authority
Keep most, if not all, old on-page SEO as
much as possible to keep Position 1 ranking
• Title tag
• Meta description
• Alt tag
• Heading
• Page level Hreflang tag
• Canonical tag
- Content
Source: Moz

19. What steps to take to keep and
further improve your SEO
performance?

20. #1. Track SEO Performance
● Ranking
● Organic Search Traffic/Sessions
● Page Loading Speed
● Google Search Console Queries and Pages
● 404 Pages

21. #2. Conduct Quarterly Website Health Check
● Missing/Duplicate/Too
long/Too short Title tag, Meta
Description, H1
● Broken and Redirecting Links
● Missing/Wrong Canonical Tag
● No-index, No follow directives

22. #3. Analyze data and determine growth opportunity
● Defend your search position
● Optimize on-page SEO as a
quick-win strategy
● Create a new page to target new
relevant keywords
● Collaborate with publishers or
synergize SEO and SEM
Keyword
Research
Defend
Optimize
Collaborate
Create
Relevant page
is ranking
above the fold
of page 1 Relevant page
is ranking
below the fold
of page 1 OR
on page 2
Relevant page
is ranking on
page 3 and
beyond
No relevant page
is ranking while
competitors have
search engine
visibility

23. #3. Move on to off-page SEO
● It is important for businesses to build
citations for the brand to be recognized.
● Google tend to give preferential treatment
to recognizable brands leading to the
website to rank easier, generate better click-
through rates, and less likely suffer from SEO
penalties.

24. #3. Move on to off-page SEO
PROSPECTING OUTREACH
CONTENT ASSET
CREATION
LINK
PLACEMENT
Shortlist websites based
on their quality,
relevance, domain
attributes and the
likelihood of them
contributing with you
Contact webmasters
of approved partner
sites and propose
content collaboration
that will yield links
Have the content
team work on
producing content
assets such as articles
or infographics for
publication within the
partner sites
The parties will
agree on a
publication date
of the article on
webmaster’s site

25. #4. Don’t Stop Optimizing your website for SEO
Analyze
data
Website
Health
Check
On-page
SEO
Integrate
with other
growth
channels
Off-page
SEO
Follow the
SEO cycle
Keep yourself
updated with
the algorithm
updates
Adjust your SEO
strategy based on the
algorithm changes

26. © Growth Marketer Academy 2019 / PROPRIETARY & CONFIDENTIAL
Connect with me on LinkedIn
© Growth Marketer Academy 2019 / PROPRIETARY & CONFIDENTIAL