SEO Site Migrations
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
FAQ's
Why are you so much cheaper than the bigger tools?
Can I not do this for myself using screaming frog?
My site has to be crawled from a certain market, can you do that?
Why do I need site monitoring?