Beyond the Basics of Website Migration: Tried, Tested & Successful - BrightonSEO Conference http://www.brightonseo.com/sessions/beyond-basics-website-migration-tried-tested-successful/

1. Omi Sido
@OmiSido
Beyond the basics of website migration

2. www.youtube.com/omisido
Beyond the Basics of Website Migration
@OmiSido #BrightonSEO

3. www.youtube.com/omisido
The Way People Normally Think about Website Migration
This website is
burning down!

4. @OmiSido #BrightonSEO
The Way I Think about Website Migration

5. @OmiSido #BrightonSEO
Website migration is your best
opportunity to significantly improve your
SEO in one go.
Beyond the Basics of Website Migration

6. @OmiSido #BrightonSEO
Beyond the Basics of Website Migration
Website migration is
your best chance to
educate your SEO team
on all aspects of SEO.

7. @OmiSido #BrightonSEO
Beyond the Basics of Website Migration
Website migration is
also your best chance to
show other departments
what SEO is.

8. @OmiSido #BrightonSEO
You need a (Cross-Functional) migration team.
The SEO guyDeveloper Content

9. @OmiSido #BrightonSEO
Website Migration - Clear Overview
•SEO migration plan (checklist).
•Content migration plan.
•Development.
•Timelines.
First, you need a plan. As you gonna be in charge
of this plan you should have 4 sections.

10. @OmiSido #BrightonSEO
Website Migration - Clear Overview
For an e-commerce store - is 2 months
before Christmas the best time to
migrate your website?
Consider when the migration will take place.

11. @OmiSido #BrightonSEO
The SEO Plan
Pre-Migration Launch
Post-Launch
Diagnostics and
Monitoring

12. @OmiSido #BrightonSEO
The SEO plan - Pre-Migration
The more time you
spent on your pre-
migration stage, the
more you increase your
chances of a successful
migration.

13. @OmiSido #BrightonSEO
The SEO plan - Pre-Migration
99% of the SEO checks you do
when in pre-migration stage
should be done at least once on a
monthly basis even when not
migrating your website.

14. @OmiSido #BrightonSEO
The SEO plan - Pre-Migration
Know your website
before migrating it to a
new platform.

15. @OmiSido #BrightonSEO
The SEO plan - Pre-Migration Full Crawl

16. @OmiSido #BrightonSEO
Pre-Migration - Orphan pages
23 % are bringing only 3% or organic visits. Is it worth keeping them?

17. @OmiSido #BrightonSEO
Pre-Migration - 404 pages
404 pages - if no
inbound links are
pointing at them
please discard.

18. @OmiSido #BrightonSEO
Pre-Migration - Things to pay attention to
Check and benchmark your rankings!
Rankings will almost certainly
fluctuate after you transfer a
website and it’s common for
rankings to decrease, so having a
before and after record of ranking
positions is invaluable.

19. @OmiSido #BrightonSEO
Pre-Migration - Content
90% of the cases, there is a content migration running in
parallel.
Can you make similar pages more
succinct by combining them into a
single asset? Are there
opportunities for improvement?

20. @OmiSido #BrightonSEO
Pre-Migration - Staging Environment
Prevent search engines from indexing your dev site!
• Requesting search engines ignore your site by adding it to your robots.txt file
• Adding a noindex meta tag to the site
• Password protecting the site
• Only allowing access to certain IP addresses
The way to do it (in order from least to most desirable methods).

21. @OmiSido #BrightonSEO
Pre-Migration - Staging
“Important! For the noindex meta tag to be
effective, the page must not be blocked by a
robots.txt file. If the page is blocked by a
robots.txt file, the crawler will never see the
noindex tag, and the page can still appear in
search results, for example, if other pages link
to it.” - Google

22. @OmiSido #BrightonSEO
Pre-Migration - 301 Mapping
301 mapping of old
URL’s to their
equivalent is the most
important task to get
right during a website
migration. Period.

23. @OmiSido #BrightonSEO
Pre-Migration - 301 Mapping (Soft 404)
The best time to clean up your product offering.
301
301
301
301
No Yes
301
Soft 404
Soft 404
Soft 404

24. @OmiSido #BrightonSEO
Pre-Migration - 301 Mapping (Soft 404)
Migrating from www.Royal.gov.uk to www.royal.uk

25. @OmiSido #BrightonSEO
Pre-Migration - 301 Mapping (Soft 404)
Migrating from www.Royal.gov.uk to www.royal.uk

26. @OmiSido #BrightonSEO
Pre-Migration - 301 Mapping - Chains Redirects
Page A Page B Page C301
301
Page A and Page B exist on the old website.
Page A redirects to Page B.
Page C is the equivalent page on the new website.
Page A should redirect directly to Page C as should Page B, rather than Page A redirecting to Page B which then redirects to Page C.
301

27. @OmiSido #BrightonSEO
Pre-Migration - Tracking
Ensure tracking code is included
on all ‘new’ pages.
Double, triple check on this one.
To check all your pages on
staging use
https://www.becontentking.com

28. @OmiSido #BrightonSEO
Website Migration - Press The Button

29. @OmiSido #BrightonSEO
Website Migration - Immediate Post-Migration Actions
• Check GA tracking is implemented and collecting data on all pages.
• Check that all redirects are working properly and 301 Moved Permanently
• Crawl URLs from the old site to check 301 redirects match up as expected.
• Check robots.txt is up-to-date
• If the domain has changed, notify search engines.
• ‘Fetch as Google’ in Google Search Console and ‘Submit URLs’ in Bing Webmaster Tools.
• Run a crawl of the new website and check for errors.
• Keep existing XML sitemaps online for at least 2-3 weeks.
• Compare the load speed of top 1 000 key pages from old website.

30. Omi Sido
@OmiSido
www.youtube.com/omisido
Brighton SEO 2017
Thank You