Sam Partland - http://www.digisearch.com.au While a migration of a small site is pretty simple, as soon as you move into migrating larger sites there are lot more things to consider. Whether it’s the more advanced redirect requirements, or poor implementation that slipped the checks, there are a number things we can do to ensure it’s still a successful one. I will run through my tips on how to correctly perform a website migration, and cover; • How to map out your migration • Issues that you may face • Post-migration analysis We will be working through analysis of data you should already have, like pre-migration rankings & website scrapes, but I will also cover how to analyse a migration where you didn't have the correct data to begin with. This would be particularly useful if you have a client that has recently stuffed one up, and needs your help, or if you’re trying to work out whether a competitor’s migration was successful.

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Migration Strategy & Analysis
Sam Partland

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Who am I?
• 11 years digital marketing experience
• Lead generation, affiliate marketing, and e-commerce projects for various
niches
• Covered all aspects of digital marketing for small businesses
• Worked agency side and currently in-house SEO at realestate.com.au

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Migrating a website
???

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1. What content does the site
currently have?

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2. What content will the new
website have?

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3. Are there content gaps to
accommodate for?

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Pre-migration

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What content does the site currently have?
• Scans everything that is linked to or in a sitemap
• URL rules can help limit scanning to sections
• Can scan staging behind a password
• Can export the data into Excel

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Grab as much ranking data as possible
• Analyse keywords that cover a wide set of URLs
• Don’t get cheap – the more data the better
• Export Google webmaster tools keyword & page URL data too
• Add the URLs to your screaming frog scan & dedupe

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Work out the difference between the old & new content
• Remove prefixes so you are just
left with a unique identifier
• VLOOKUP / match from old to
new (and vice versa) to find out
the difference
Old New

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Make sure your new XML sitemaps are ready to go
Maintain the old URLs in a separate sitemap for faster indexing of redirects

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Know any issues that the new site has as these will affect performance

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Is it worth running campaigns or increasing budget for SEM?

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Planning the redirects

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If only the domain / prefix is changing, just wildcard it!
Olddomain.com/awesome-content/
Newdomain.com/awesome-content/
Domain.com/old/awesome-content/
Domain.com/new/awesome-content/

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But it’s rarely that easy

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Three levels of redirects should be investigated
Olddomain.com/awesome-content/
Newdomain.com/awesome-content/
Domain.com/old/awesome-content/
Domain.com/new/awesome-content/
1. Wildcard
Olddomain.com/awesome-content/
Newdomain.com/amazing-article/
Domain.com/old/awesome-content/
Domain.com/new/amazing-article/
2. 1-to-1 Content URL
Olddomain.com/awesome-content/
Newdomain.com/closest-category/
Domain.com/old/awesome-content/
Domain.com/new/closest-category/
3. 1-to-1 Category URL
Only catch-all if you can redirect somewhere related

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Let the developer implement these where possible

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And test them all on a staging site where possible

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What content does the site currently have?

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Issues that you might face
• HTTP vs HTTPs
• Trailing slash vs no trailing slash
• Miss-spellings in the rules – It does happen!
• Redirects being turned off

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During a migration

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Fetch as Google and submit your sitemaps

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If you changed your domain, submit a ‘change of address’

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What content does the site currently have?
• Scan the new site to make sure everything's okay
• Scan all previous URLs to confirm redirects

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RANKINGS

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Post-migration

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Rankings are the first sign of migration performance
Category Searches Apr-16 Jun-16
N/A 3,520,120 42.1 41.8
Category 1 401,600 26.3 25.0
Category 2 236,150 16.8 17.4
Category 3 158,410 3.2 2.2
Category 4 107,880 21.4 22.1
Category 5 81,530 16.8 17.9
Category 6 62,700 9.0 9.6
Category 7 49,520 8.9 9.2
Category 8 12,130 12.0 12.3
Category 9 9,310 5.2 5.5
Category 10 4,440 6.4 4.8
Grand Total 4,643,790 27.7 27.6
Average Rankings
Category Searches Apr-16 Jun-16
N/A 3,520,120 7,829 3,855
Category 1 401,600 10,913 9,432
Category 2 236,150 7,062 6,031
Category 3 158,410 63,087 62,837
Category 4 107,880 10,332 8,964
Category 5 81,530 6,688 5,256
Category 6 62,700 17,093 13,648
Category 7 49,520 7,285 6,776
Category 8 12,130 716 671
Category 9 9,310 2,636 2,630
Category 10 4,440 1,684 1,624
Grand Total 4,643,790 135,326 121,725
Estimated Traffic

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Website organic search traffic would soon follow
• Strip back to a unique identifier
• Analyse at URL level or categorise
and view at category level

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With GWT / search console being the next analysis point
Clicks Impressions Av. Rank
Category Old New Category Old New Category Old New
Category 1 16,085 14,220 Category 1 42,378 39,997 Category 1 1.94 2.52
Category 2 2,160 1,746 Category 2 17,945 15,082 Category 2 2.42 2.95
Category 3 1,661 1,428 Category 3 9,781 9,283 Category 3 1.49 1.79
Category 4 1,591 1,150 Category 4 7,481 6,773 Category 4 1.23 1.22
Category 5 1,238 843 Category 5 7,063 5,539 Category 5 1.43 1.85
Category 6 776 545 Category 6 6,947 6,187 Category 6 1.61 1.83
Category 7 643 412 Category 7 6,644 4,696 Category 7 2.41 3.56
Category 8 328 313 Category 8 2,710 1,503 Category 8 4.85 6.07
Category 9 271 264 Category 9 1,381 1,737 Category 9 1.48 1.87
Category 10 260 158 Category 10 1,115 1,519 Category 10 3.51 5.61
N/A 87 52 N/A 454 385 N/A 1.15 1.38
Grand Total 25,100 21,131 Grand Total 103,899 92,701 Grand Total 1.94 2.21

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No pre-migration data?

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Download historic & recent ranking
• Export as much data as possible
• Sort / filter the data to avoid your
account limit a bit

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Because SEMrush has multiple positions, only keep the best rank of each
• Sort by keyword, then by ranking (low to high)
• Remove dupes from keyword column

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Merge into a single file, with a VLOOKUP
Keyword Search Volume Apr-16 Apr-16 Est. Traffic Jun-16 Jun-16 Est. Traffic Category Original URL New URL
keyword 1 50000 32 0 35 0 Category 1 https://domain.com/url-1 https://domain.com/new-url-1
keyword 2 21000 31 0 35 0 Category 2 https://domain.com/url-2 https://domain.com/url-2
keyword 3 11000 32 0 33 0 Category 3 https://domain.com/url-3 https://domain.com/url-3
keyword 4 7000 5 3326.92801 5 3426.92801 Category 4 https://domain.com/url-4 https://domain.com/new-url-4
keyword 5 7000 31 0 31 0 Category 5 https://domain.com/url-5 https://domain.com/url-5
keyword 6 7000 84 0 84 0 Category 6 https://domain.com/url-6 https://domain.com/url-6
keyword 7 6500 22 0 65 0 Category 7 https://domain.com/url-7 https://domain.com/url-7
keyword 8 6500 25 0 25 0 Category 8 https://domain.com/url-8 https://domain.com/new-url-8
keyword 9 4500 36 0 67 0 Category 9 https://domain.com/url-9 https://domain.com/url-9
keyword 10 4500 15 121.5 63 0 Category 10 https://domain.com/url-10 https://domain.com/url-10
And then….

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What content does the site currently have?

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Run original URLs through screaming frog to get status codes
Keyword Search Volume Apr-16 Apr-16 Est. Traffic Jun-16 Jun-16 Est. Traffic Category Original URL New URL
keyword 1 50000 32 0 35 0 Category 1 https://domain.com/url-1 https://domain.com/new-url-1
keyword 2 21000 31 0 35 0 Category 2 https://domain.com/url-2 https://domain.com/url-2
keyword 3 11000 32 0 33 0 Category 3 https://domain.com/url-3 https://domain.com/url-3
keyword 4 7000 5 3326.92801 5 3426.92801 Category 4 https://domain.com/url-4 https://domain.com/new-url-4
keyword 5 7000 31 0 31 0 Category 5 https://domain.com/url-5 https://domain.com/url-5
keyword 6 7000 84 0 84 0 Category 6 https://domain.com/url-6 https://domain.com/url-6
keyword 7 6500 22 0 65 0 Category 7 https://domain.com/url-7 https://domain.com/url-7
keyword 8 6500 25 0 25 0 Category 8 https://domain.com/url-8 https://domain.com/new-url-8
keyword 9 4500 36 0 67 0 Category 9 https://domain.com/url-9 https://domain.com/url-9
keyword 10 4500 15 121.5 63 0 Category 10 https://domain.com/url-10 https://domain.com/url-10
• Confirm if the redirected-to URL, is the current ranking URL
• Let you see if you missed anything

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Filter by original URL status code to see the impact of the migration
Untouched | Redirected | Errored
-4,000 (4%) | -5,500 (30%) | -4,000 (55%)

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Some of my tips

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Remove category-base / prefixes with SUBSTITUTE
More effective than Find / Replace because you also retain original data
Original
text
Text to
change
Change to
(blank)

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Modify category-bases with categorisation formula
Substitute old
with new
Categorise
with ‘find’
Categorise with
‘category’

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Wordpress plugin to manage redirects & 404s
https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/

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‘Guess’ a new URL by Scraping a blog posts category in Google Docs
http://zoomspring.com/learn-importxml-tutorial/
Makes
Horizontal
URL (cell
reference)
What you’re searching inside What you
want to
extract
https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo
We could now ‘guess’ a new URL could be
http://moz.com/blog/technical-seo/301-redirection-rules-for-seo

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So to complete a successful migration you would….
• Prepare with as much data as possible
• Compare old and new content and work out the differences
• Investigate 3 levels of redirects – Wildcards, 1-to-1 content,
and 1-to-1 category
• Analyse before & after rankings along with their URLs
And…

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What content does the site currently have?

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And just quickly…

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A new SEO tool to change the way we interpret our data

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Currently keyword & search volume management

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With categorisation of them faster & easier

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And so much more planned!
• Assisted bulk keyword research & generation
• Rank tracking of full SERPs
• Search market & competitor analysis
• Search Console / Google Analytics integration
• And that’s just the start…

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Thankyou!
Questions?