SEO Site Migrations

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As Technology advances and your business changes what is required from it’s website, it’s a necessary evil that you will need to reimagine your website. I can help prevent those changes do not disrupt your SEO performance.
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What is a Site Migration and what is involved?

A site migration is typically when a large part, if not all, of your website is changed and/or moved. The aim here is to minimise the liklihood of issues as this takes place and to help the search engines to update their systems.
URL auditing

URL auditing

Moving URLs can mean you introduce a lot of disruption for both users and search engines, which is further exacerbated by the fact you probably already have redirects on your website. I can take ownership of auditing current redirects, mapping and consolidating new ones and testing they work as expected once live.
Template reviews

Template reviews

A good tactic for minimising disruption caused by changing your pages is to test and review the new versions before building them and sending them live. I will work from Design to Development to ensure you’re minimising the liklihood of things going wrong.
Technology Planning

Technology Planning

Moving from legacy to modern technology can involve a lot of risk, especially as your engineering teams begin to thinking using different conventions and norms. I am happy to join from requirements gathering to proof of concepting so to make sure that mistakes or oversights are captured as early in the project as is possible.
Risk management

Risk management

Managing the risk to trading associated with migrating your website is important, and possible through being careful and considered about the rollout. For example, can we test how Google and users respond with less valuable pages? What is the rollback plan if something goes wrong?. I help my clients by bringing a framework for thinking about both how to minimise and deal with issues proactively.

How the Process Works

Step 1

Orienteering and Planning

Typically I start by getting as much information as is practical so I can help to create an agenda and to establish milestones and touchpoints within the process.
Step 2

Supportive work

As each migration is different it’s not possible to be exhaustive with what happens next, however I broadly help with doing the legwork of mapping, auditing and being the QA point of contact for SEO.
Step 3

Risk planning

Using a personal framework I’ve developed with a view to managing risk, I undergo planning and training related to where the risks are and how I propose we approach them. Examples of things being discussed are can we separate testing users from search engines? Or, can we tackle each step of the migration separately and what is our rollback procedure?
Step 4

Pushing the button!

I will be available either remotely or on premises to support on the day with monitoring during the move. I provide pre and post migration reviews to ensure all systems are working as expected and can triage any issues found to the appropriate team. Assuming all goes well, I lastly congratulate you and the team.
Have a question about the process?
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FAQ's

There's not much mention of SEO in the above, how comes?
The conventional wisdom here is that if users enjoy being on your website, meander around and complete whatever it is that they came to do – then search engines will favour you in their results. Whether that’s due to bounce rate, pogo-sticking, scroll depth or a long list of other considerations is largely academic, what’s important is that the more people who access and accomplish their task using your website the less you’ll have to worry about in terms of SEO.
How do I know if my site is slow?

Firstly it’s worth clarifying that your website can be slow to load and slow in terms of interactivity (I.e. when you click on a button nothing happens).

Whilst tools exist that I can share which list how well you score on a scale of 1 – 100 or A – F, a more practical and simpler test is simply to disconnect from wifi on your phone and click around your website. If the pages are taking a long time to finish loading, things randomly shift around and when you click on something it takes a noticeably long time for anything to happen – then it’s probably slow enough to warrant having a conversation.

The aim here is to keep people in the flow of what they’re doing, a button not doing anything when I click on it creates rage clicks and is usually a good reason for someone to go back to a search engine and try someone else.

What's the difference between lab testing and RUM testing?

Lab testing, sometimes called synthetic testing, refers to using tools which try to emulate the experiences of users and in doing so measures and scores what they expect will be your scores. Lab testing is integral for measuring whilst working on improvements, it allows engineers to see what the expected difference in timing will be once released to the website.

RUM, or Real User Measurement, testing is when you proactively measure users experiences when using your website. The benefit here is that it is 1st party data, which means it’s more dependable and carries no erroneous assumptions.

A fun bit of trivia is that Google actually provides you with RUM data by discreetly measuring users experiences in the chrome browser. This means that even if you have not been actively measuring your users interactions you can gather some data from Chrome.

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