website migration seo: advanced migration strategy & analysis
Post on 12-Apr-2017
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Sam Partland
Migration Strategy & Analysis
Sam Partland
Sam Partland
Who am I?
• 11 years digital marketing experience
• Lead generation, affiliate marketing, and e-commerce projects for various niches
• Covered all aspects of digital marketing for small businesses
• Worked agency side and currently in-house SEO at realestate.com.au
Sam Partland
Migrating a website
???
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1. What content does the site currently have?
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2. What content will the new website have?
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3. Are there content gaps to accommodate for?
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Pre-migration
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What content does the site currently have?
• Scans everything that is linked to or in a sitemap
• URL rules can help limit scanning to sections
• Can scan staging behind a password
• Can export the data into Excel
Sam Partland
Grab as much ranking data as possible
• Analyse keywords that cover a wide set of URLs
• Don’t get cheap – the more data the better
• Export Google webmaster tools keyword & page URL data too
• Add the URLs to your screaming frog scan & dedupe
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Work out the difference between the old & new content
• Remove prefixes so you are just left with a unique identifier
• VLOOKUP / match from old to new (and vice versa) to find out the difference
Old New
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Make sure your new XML sitemaps are ready to go
Maintain the old URLs in a separate sitemap for faster indexing of redirects
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Know any issues that the new site has as these will affect performance
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Is it worth running campaigns or increasing budget for SEM?
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Planning the redirects
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If only the domain / prefix is changing, just wildcard it!
Olddomain.com/awesome-content/Newdomain.com/awesome-content/
Domain.com/old/awesome-content/Domain.com/new/awesome-content/
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Sam Partland
But it’s rarely that easy
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Three levels of redirects should be investigated
Olddomain.com/awesome-content/
Newdomain.com/awesome-content/
Domain.com/old/awesome-content/
Domain.com/new/awesome-content/
1. Wildcard
Olddomain.com/awesome-content/
Newdomain.com/amazing-article/
Domain.com/old/awesome-content/
Domain.com/new/amazing-article/
2. 1-to-1 Content URL
Olddomain.com/awesome-content/
Newdomain.com/closest-category/
Domain.com/old/awesome-content/
Domain.com/new/closest-category/
3. 1-to-1 Category URL
Only catch-all if you can redirect somewhere related
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Let the developer implement these where possible
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And test them all on a staging site where possible
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What content does the site currently have?
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Issues that you might face
• HTTP vs HTTPs
• Trailing slash vs no trailing slash
• Miss-spellings in the rules – It does happen!
• Redirects being turned off
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During a migration
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Fetch as Google and submit your sitemaps
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If you changed your domain, submit a ‘change of address’
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What content does the site currently have?
• Scan the new site to make sure everything's okay
• Scan all previous URLs to confirm redirects
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RANKINGS
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Post-migration
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Rankings are the first sign of migration performance
Category Searches Apr-16 Jun-16
N/A 3,520,120 42.1 41.8
Category 1 401,600 26.3 25.0
Category 2 236,150 16.8 17.4
Category 3 158,410 3.2 2.2
Category 4 107,880 21.4 22.1
Category 5 81,530 16.8 17.9
Category 6 62,700 9.0 9.6
Category 7 49,520 8.9 9.2
Category 8 12,130 12.0 12.3
Category 9 9,310 5.2 5.5
Category 10 4,440 6.4 4.8
Grand Total 4,643,790 27.7 27.6
Average Rankings
Category Searches Apr-16 Jun-16
N/A 3,520,120 7,829 3,855
Category 1 401,600 10,913 9,432
Category 2 236,150 7,062 6,031
Category 3 158,410 63,087 62,837
Category 4 107,880 10,332 8,964
Category 5 81,530 6,688 5,256
Category 6 62,700 17,093 13,648
Category 7 49,520 7,285 6,776
Category 8 12,130 716 671
Category 9 9,310 2,636 2,630
Category 10 4,440 1,684 1,624
Grand Total 4,643,790 135,326 121,725
Estimated Traffic
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Website organic search traffic would soon follow
• Strip back to a unique identifier
• Analyse at URL level or categorise and view at category level
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With GWT / search console being the next analysis point
Clicks Impressions Av. RankCategory Old New Category Old New Category Old NewCategory 1 16,085 14,220 Category 1 42,378 39,997 Category 1 1.94 2.52
Category 2 2,160 1,746 Category 2 17,945 15,082 Category 2 2.42 2.95
Category 3 1,661 1,428 Category 3 9,781 9,283 Category 3 1.49 1.79
Category 4 1,591 1,150 Category 4 7,481 6,773 Category 4 1.23 1.22
Category 5 1,238 843 Category 5 7,063 5,539 Category 5 1.43 1.85
Category 6 776 545 Category 6 6,947 6,187 Category 6 1.61 1.83
Category 7 643 412 Category 7 6,644 4,696 Category 7 2.41 3.56
Category 8 328 313 Category 8 2,710 1,503 Category 8 4.85 6.07
Category 9 271 264 Category 9 1,381 1,737 Category 9 1.48 1.87
Category 10 260 158 Category 10 1,115 1,519 Category 10 3.51 5.61
N/A 87 52 N/A 454 385 N/A 1.15 1.38
Grand Total 25,100 21,131 Grand Total 103,899 92,701 Grand Total 1.94 2.21
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No pre-migration data?
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Download historic & recent ranking
• Export as much data as possible
• Sort / filter the data to avoid your account limit a bit
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Because SEMrush has multiple positions, only keep the best rank of each
• Sort by keyword, then by ranking (low to high)
• Remove dupes from keyword column
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Merge into a single file, with a VLOOKUP
Keyword Search Volume Apr-16 Apr-16 Est. Traffic Jun-16 Jun-16 Est. Traffic Category Original URL New URL
keyword 1 50000 32 0 35 0 Category 1 https://domain.com/url-1 https://domain.com/new-url-1
keyword 2 21000 31 0 35 0 Category 2 https://domain.com/url-2 https://domain.com/url-2
keyword 3 11000 32 0 33 0 Category 3 https://domain.com/url-3 https://domain.com/url-3
keyword 4 7000 5 3326.92801 5 3426.92801 Category 4 https://domain.com/url-4 https://domain.com/new-url-4
keyword 5 7000 31 0 31 0 Category 5 https://domain.com/url-5 https://domain.com/url-5
keyword 6 7000 84 0 84 0 Category 6 https://domain.com/url-6 https://domain.com/url-6
keyword 7 6500 22 0 65 0 Category 7 https://domain.com/url-7 https://domain.com/url-7
keyword 8 6500 25 0 25 0 Category 8 https://domain.com/url-8 https://domain.com/new-url-8
keyword 9 4500 36 0 67 0 Category 9 https://domain.com/url-9 https://domain.com/url-9
keyword 10 4500 15 121.5 63 0 Category 10 https://domain.com/url-10 https://domain.com/url-10
And then….
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What content does the site currently have?
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Run original URLs through screaming frog to get status codes
Keyword Search Volume Apr-16 Apr-16 Est. Traffic Jun-16 Jun-16 Est. Traffic Category Original URL New URL
keyword 1 50000 32 0 35 0 Category 1 https://domain.com/url-1 https://domain.com/new-url-1
keyword 2 21000 31 0 35 0 Category 2 https://domain.com/url-2 https://domain.com/url-2
keyword 3 11000 32 0 33 0 Category 3 https://domain.com/url-3 https://domain.com/url-3
keyword 4 7000 5 3326.92801 5 3426.92801 Category 4 https://domain.com/url-4 https://domain.com/new-url-4
keyword 5 7000 31 0 31 0 Category 5 https://domain.com/url-5 https://domain.com/url-5
keyword 6 7000 84 0 84 0 Category 6 https://domain.com/url-6 https://domain.com/url-6
keyword 7 6500 22 0 65 0 Category 7 https://domain.com/url-7 https://domain.com/url-7
keyword 8 6500 25 0 25 0 Category 8 https://domain.com/url-8 https://domain.com/new-url-8
keyword 9 4500 36 0 67 0 Category 9 https://domain.com/url-9 https://domain.com/url-9
keyword 10 4500 15 121.5 63 0 Category 10 https://domain.com/url-10 https://domain.com/url-10
• Confirm if the redirected-to URL, is the current ranking URL
• Let you see if you missed anything
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Filter by original URL status code to see the impact of the migration
Untouched | Redirected | Errored
-4,000 (4%) | -5,500 (30%) | -4,000 (55%)
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Some of my tips
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Remove category-base / prefixes with SUBSTITUTE
More effective than Find / Replace because you also retain original data
Original text
Text to change
Change to (blank)
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Modify category-bases with categorisation formula
Substitute old with new
Categorise with ‘find’
Categorise with ‘category’
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Wordpress plugin to manage redirects & 404s
https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/
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‘Guess’ a new URL by Scraping a blog posts category in Google Docs
http://zoomspring.com/learn-importxml-tutorial/
Makes Horizontal
URL (cell reference)
What you’re searching inside What you want to extract
https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo
We could now ‘guess’ a new URL could be
http://moz.com/blog/technical-seo/301-redirection-rules-for-seo
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So to complete a successful migration you would….
• Prepare with as much data as possible
• Compare old and new content and work out the differences
• Investigate 3 levels of redirects – Wildcards, 1-to-1 content, and 1-to-1 category
• Analyse before & after rankings along with their URLs
And…
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What content does the site currently have?
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And just quickly…
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A new SEO tool to change the way we interpret our data
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Currently keyword & search volume management
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With categorisation of them faster & easier
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And so much more planned!
• Assisted bulk keyword research & generation
• Rank tracking of full SERPs
• Search market & competitor analysis
• Search Console / Google Analytics integration
• And that’s just the start…
Sam Partland
Thankyou!
Questions?
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