Five things to remember for a smooth, catastrophe-free site migration
For an excellent proportion of you, your website might be your single-most essential enterprise asset. It’s the place you drive visitors, gross sales, model visibility (on-line and offline), and generate ROI.
It’s additionally in all probability the place you make investments nearly all of your time and capital – when it comes to design, construct, upkeep, and marketing.
But there’s no level spending tens of millions on a brand new website if nobody’s going to see it.
I lately analysed the impression of what occurs when website migrations don’t go to plan.
Just check out this main excessive road financial institution – it’s not arduous to think about how a lot this downtime value them; each financially and when it comes to their web optimization legacy.
What have been they considering?
This firm misplaced their (earlier lengthy-time period) presence within the natural search area for a variety of commercially worthwhile search phrases following a migration, and by no means recovered positions thereafter.
And, what are you able to do however standby and watch when this occurs?
You can’t reverse engineer web optimization into your technique, as a result of the injury has already been accomplished. In this case, the corporate threw some huge cash at PPC to claw again some presence – however not all of us have the finances for that.
The reason for this grave website migration error? A failure to plan and implement a cohesive search engine optimization technique.
The previous migratory fantasy
But that’s sufficient about my weekend…
In all seriousness although, these are a few of the most coronary heart-assault inducing actions you’ll be able to undertake – and lots of SEOs would have you ever consider that website migrations are up there with them…
Even Google is filled with frankly terrifying website migration horror tales, which warn you to anticipate a lack of anyplace between 20% – 70% in website visitors.
But this doesn’t need to be the case. Migrations may be enjoyable. Whether it’s to rebrand, apply a brand new area construction, or replace your CMS, there are a selection of causes for eager to migrate your website and regardless of in style perception, it might actually current you with an excellent alternative for enhancing search presence and optimising your ROI, as long as you might have a foolproof plan.
I can’t stress sufficient the significance of getting ready a tailor-made web optimization technique, so I’ve outlined 5 important steps for attaining a clean website migration.
M. Involve search engine marketing from the beginning
Make positive you’ve an skilled workforce member engaged on the challenge, who will help to include web optimization in any respect related contact factors, from the SOW onwards; together with CMS selections, structure, taxonomy, web page-theming, use of photographs, inner linking and so on.
Leave nothing to probability! Don’t simply give it to the closest Dev Guy.
“Barry, are you busy? Can you web optimization the brand new website please?”
P. Consolidate your redirects and mapping
Crawling each web page of your website is intrinsic to a profitable migration. You actually need to know the place you’re earlier than you start.
Create an in depth redirect map and audit H1s, web page titles, meta-descriptions and extra, to tell the structure of your new website.
This can also be the stage to determine the stragglers – we’re speaking the orphan pages and subdomains which aren’t working onerous sufficient, and might be stripped from the brand new website to create a extra streamlined structure. Don’t overlook paid marketing campaign pages both.
Finally, be sure to check every little thing completely in staging and after launch.
A. Use your knowledge
Your knowledge is your life jacket. You ought to use it to:
- Analyse website efficiency all through the “Migration Window” (see finish of article). Daily monitoring is vital to evaluating your websites true visibility pre and publish migration. It provides you the complete image of your migratory success, and highlights unfavourable motion; permitting you to create an on the spot plan of motion.
- Benchmark visibility towards rivals. Site-agnostic knowledge exhibits you who’s performing higher and why. You can use this to tweak your content material and website construction for an efficient migration.
- Identify alternatives: Discover pages that, with solely a slight push throughout migration, can transfer up into the conversion zone.
- Determine and knead out battle points: Ensure inner cannibalisation isn’t carried over to the brand new website.
- Look out for any present redirects to keep away from cycles
A. Make positive there’s a undertaking proprietor:
As above, assign one individual duty and authority to run the migration and ensure they’re solely au fait with the structure and all parts of the location.
They have to be absolutely-concerned and empowered sufficient to make a case for implementing the above processes, even when it means difficult these people who’re eager to simply accept the migratory fantasy.
H. Prevent the stage from being revealed:
Your stage website is one thing which you actually need to hold beneath wraps – particularly as robots.txt solely blocks crawling and never indexing – which means your stage website might nonetheless get listed and launched into the digital ether, if the proper precautions aren’t carried out.
In a number of instances I assume I might even have seen a stage website being listed after being shared internally by way of Google mail – however don’t quote me on that!
So, in fact, use IP whitelisting, arrange logins and apply no-index meta tags.
What is the “migration window”?
The migration window refers back to the seven to 14 day interval after a migration has been executed. During this time, your rankings might assume many various varieties together with:
- A straight change within the SERPS – previous web page for brand spanking new
- The change-over might take a while to set in
- Random drops can happen
- You may even see a quick coexistence between your two domains for a short while
- You might see an easy transition, with no change in rankings
- And in fact, the outcome everybody hopes for: You may even see a constructive uplift in efficiency (That’s when you comply with the steps above!)
In abstract
search engine optimization ought to be the cornerstone of any website migration technique. Without it, we might as nicely drag and drop our website into the recycling bin, together with its rankings, backlinks and social media exercise.
We shouldn’t anticipate to lose visibility, or purchase into the previous ‘migratory fable’ both. Instead, we have to use knowledge to tell our whole technique earlier than, throughout and after the migration.
And, keep in mind, you possibly can’t simply sprinkle magic search engine optimisation mud in your website if issues go mistaken.
Your visibility will already be broken. That’s why we SEOs have to get in on the motion from the phrase go, to safeguard our most essential asset, and capitalise on any enterprise alternatives.
