A failed site migration can include a loss in traffic, a drop in rankings in search results and a lower engagement on your site. Find out how to avoid the mistakes that lead to a failed site migration with James Brown, SEO Strategist at Oban International

1. James Brown
@ObanIntl
OBAN INTERNATIONAL
Six site migration fails and
how to avoid them
https://www.slideshare.net/OBAN-IDForum

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Today is not about…

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Today is not about…

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How to avoid failure

5. Failure comes
in many forms
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What is failure?
Traffic
has gone
0
2000
4000
6000
8000
10000
12000
14000
16000
18000
20000
Organic Visits

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What is failure?
The site
has lost
rankings

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What is failure?
Engagement
is down

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What is failure?
The site is
a technical
mess

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What is failure?
There is
no trust

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What is failure?
There is
no
process

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13. 1. Traffic
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Traffic should look like this

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Instead it looks like this

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Have you considered this?

17. Consider misattribution
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Think all channels
What’s the
bigger
picture?

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GTM
Check the
set up

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GDPR & Bots
Check your
filters every
time

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Check the setup

23. 2. Rankings
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24. Rankings are great…
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Fair and
helpful

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THE WHOLE
PICTURE

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Rank drops, trust issue

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Lost ranks, site issue

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Check your server logs
Is Google
hitting your
content?

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Check your server logs
Crawl
budget is
limited

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Check your server logs
Is content
prioritised?

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Update any/all links
•Robots.txt
•Sitemaps
•Internal links
(absolute vs
relative)
•Canonicals
•Hreflang tags
•Off site signals
owned/earned
•Meta robots

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Ensure your site’s stability
Engage in
stress
testing

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Ensure your site’s stability
Always
good to
know for
big events

35. 3. User Engagement
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Congratulations, you
survived drops…

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…but people no longer like
your site

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UX before migrations…

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UX after migrations…

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Understand slight changes

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Choose your test
Heat-maps Screen recordings Interviews Expert reviews
Heuristics Analytics
Cultural research
Colour review &
accessibility
Linguistic review A/B & MV testing

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A/B & MV testing
Trial out
changes
before
migration
2 1

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A/B & MV testing
+5%Total purchases

45. 4. Technology
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Your whole site is changing

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Ensure your site’s stability
Always good to
know for big
events

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Google’s opinion

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301’s can be an issue
“Additional HTTP redirects
can [incur] hundreds of
milliseconds of extra
latency on 4G networks.”

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Google on redirects
Don’t

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Reconsider relative URLs
http://www.seo.com http://seo.com
http://www.seo.com/ http://seo.com/
https://www.seo.com https://seo.com
https://www.seo.com/ https://seo.com/

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Status code for rel URL
200

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Automated tasks

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Manual tasks (or curation)

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Manual vs automation
•Internal links
•Site files
•Compression
•Localisation

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Development resource
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/robots.txt

57. 5. Truth, Authority
& Relevance
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Development resource

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You’ll lose all three

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Have a clear structure
Planning
process
Full technical
audit (new site)
URL mapping
Link review and
clean-up
Optimisation
checks
Pre live testing
Pre live
benchmark
Go live process
Post live
monitoring

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Fix crawl issues

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Start sending good signals

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Clean up internal links

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Clean up external links

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Forecast problem areas
Broken links
Duplicate
content
Chained
redirects
Broken
tracking
Wrong
canonicals
JavaScript
redirects
Broken
hreflang
Lost referrals
Slow page
load speed
Bad UX
Loss of
content
Losing access
to search
console
Limited crawl
budget
Wrong status
code
Devs going
YOLO (kids
still say it)

66. 6. Process
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Be like Batman

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You’re not Batman

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Don’t take on too many projects

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Benchmark everything before

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Optimise before to mitigate loss

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Backup your site… JIC

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Good luck!

74. Thank you!
74

75. 75
ONE SIZE
WHY INTERNATIONAL
MARKETING FOR FASHION
BRANDS DEMANDS A
TAILORED APPROACH
DOESN’T
FIT ALL
FRIDAY
05 OCT 2018