Don't F*ck Up Your Site Migration - Serena Pearson

@exceldaddy
Don’t F*ck Up
Your Site Migration
Serena Pearson

@exceldaddy
Agenda
● Introduction
● Client Background & On-Boarding
● Pre-Migration Preparation
● Staging Environment
● Post-Migration Actions
● Learnings & Analysis

@exceldaddy
This is me
● SEO Manager At Kaizen (Content Marketing)
● You can call me Excel Daddy
● Undying love for Technical SEO
● Almost didn’t get my first SEO job because I arrived with
a skateboard

@exceldaddy
The 5 Stages Of A Site Migration
Organic performance
Indexation figures
Relaying results to
different stakeholders
What next?
Learnings & Analytics
Search Console actions
Full site audit
Check against
benchmarking figures
Consistent monitoring
Post-Migration
URL mapping
Prioritising SEO changes
Full technical and
content monitoring
Implementation checks
Staging Environment
Benchmarking
Mapping
Identifying SEO
opportunities
Reporting setup
Pre-Migration
Understand the purpose
Manage expectations
Relationship with
stakeholders
Budgeting time
On-Boarding

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On-Boarding

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Understand the purpose of the migration
On-Boarding Pre-Migration Staging Environment Post-Migration Learnings & Analytics
New Legal Policy? Rebrand? New Markets?
Closing Markets? New Products? New Target Audience?
Helping understand why they are making the changes can impact your activity, and better understand the other changes
being made to the site, so that you can monitor and review them.

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Know your stakeholders
● Who is initiating this migration?
● Why are they doing this migration?
● Who are the devs in charge of implementing the
redirects?
● Who are the people managing the content?
● Who are the people managing the other digital
media channels, and need to update their links?
● Anyone else?
● Who will we need to report to?

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Traffic will always
drop
Manage your client’s expectations.
Clients generally understand that one website needs to point to the other.
But it’s not just that, make sure you, and your client, understand the risks.
The minimum you should expect is for the traffic to return back to normal levels.

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… and how much time you spend fixing another person’s mistake.
Budget your time effectively.
Do not underestimate
how much time you
will need

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Pre-Migration

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Pre-migration activity summary
Review Staging
Environment
Ensure that it is non-
indexable or
accessible with
searchbots, noindex
tags, password
protection, etx.
URL Mapping
Identify Priority Pages
The most valuable
assets that can’t
afford to lose visibility
- top traffic drivers
and backlink
magnets.
Review Analytics
Setup
Ensure all analytics,
including advanced
(e.g. event tracking)
features are properly
set up.
Benchmarking
Page Load Speed,
Rankings, Traffic &
other KPIs
Keeping Old Crawls
To compare post-
migration, this
includes Search
Console.

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Benchmarking & analytics review
What is your pagespeed
score for priority
pages?
Which analytics view
are you going to use?
Why? Is this going to
change?
Benchmark your traffic
levels.
Anything else relevant
to your client.

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Reporting setup and benchmarking
Set up an automated report which your client will have
access to. Data studios or Sheets with full visibility across
different markets & pages, with all your KPIs.

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Put your roadmap together

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URL mapping and identifying priority pages
Wireframe Review
Map all the URLS from the old domain into the new domain.
During the process, this coincides with the SEO content audit to prune out and re-
structure where possible.

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Identifying SEO opportunities
Full SEO Audit
Conducting a full technical and content SEO
audit of the existing website to identify any
issues and provide recommendations
accordingly.
This depends on the size of your website. If it’s
small and easy enough to implement within the
CMS, definitely push for this to be fixed.
If you think this will cause issues with crawling and
indexation, such as with JS or duplicate content,
push this to be fixed.
As you map your URLs, you should begin to get an
understanding already of the site architecture and
areas of opportunity, if there are changes which you
think will be very beneficial, push for it.

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Staging Environment

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Full Site Review
robots.txt
Response Code Audit
Canonical Tag
SERP Review
XML Sitemap
Parameters & Fragments
Duplicate Content
Pagination
Page Load Speed
HTTP & HTTPS
.htaccess file
Accessibility & Indexability
Mobile Friendly
Javascript Coding
Internal Linking
Conducting a full SEO audit of the testing environment, including checking whether or not SEO recommendations and
guidance has been implemented, and ensuring that it is suitable for it to go live. This also applies post launch.

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URL Mapping
Don’t assume the developers have implemented everything correctly.
You will more then likely have to make these checks, again and again and AGAIN.
Create a table which maps A to B, and keep updating as things change (Because they will).
Automate the process.
Wireframe Review
Map all the URLS from the old domain into the new domain.
During the process, this coincides with the SEO content audit to prune out
and re-structure where possible.
Remember this?
This is your new best
friend

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Once you’ve completed your technical audit, you will most likely hear:
‘We don’t have the resource to implement all your changes, what do you recommend for us to prioritise?’.
Be ready.
Prioritising key SEO opportunities

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Post-Migration

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Have all the pages moved over? Are 301 redirects in place? Is all the content there?

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Google Analytics Disavow File Change Of Address Sitemap Submission
URL Inspection
International
Targeting
Coverage Tool Mobile Usability
GTM Container
301 Redirects In
Place
Tier 1 Content Tier 2 Content
XML Sitemap Check Status Code Audit noindex, noarchive Soft 404 Check
Canonical Tag
Review
Meta Data Moved Navigation Check .htaccess 404
Migration Day - Priority Checks

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Search Console Actions
Use the Blocked Resources report to
check for critical issues. Use Fetch
as Google on every single page type
across desktop and mobile.
Upload a separate sitemap with the
old site’s indexable pages to help
search engines discover the
redirects that are in place. Configure
the URL parameters to deal with
duplicate content issues. Use the
change of address tool.

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Full site audit & implementation checks
Keep Your Old Crawls
Ensure that you properly check
the SEO of the new website, and
compare it to your old ones with
your standard Screaming Frog
data.
Canonicals
Redirects
Etc.

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Check against benchmarks
What is your pagespeed
score for priority
pages?
Which analytics view
are you going to use?
Why? Is this going to
change?
Benchmark your traffic
levels.
Anything else relevant
to your client.

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Consistent monitoring schedule (automated)
Reporting
Monitor key SEO KPIs, including…
Keyword Tracking
Desktop & Mobile visibility
Organic sessions
Bounce rate
Conversion rate
Revenue
Total number of indexed pages
Submitted vs Indexed pages submitted via
the XML sitemaps
Pages receiving at least one organic visit
Number of ‘not found’ pages
Site speed scores and metrics.

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Results

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Results and performance

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Performance report

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Learnings & Next Steps

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Relaying information to different stakeholders
Remember this?

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Learnings
Things don’t always go to plan.
Be patient with your migration
coordinator.
Automate as much as possible.
Create templates.
Create a checklist with all actions
and stakeholders.
Be as clear as possible when
communicating with other people.

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You’ve Proven Your
Worth

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You’ve Identified The
Opportunities

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You Have The Power

Don't F*ck Up Your Site Migration - Serena Pearson

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