website migration seo: advanced migration strategy & analysis

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

???

Sam Partland

1. What content does the site currently have?

Sam Partland

2. What content will the new website have?

Sam Partland

3. Are there content gaps to accommodate for?

Sam Partland

Pre-migration

Sam Partland

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

Sam Partland

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

Sam Partland

Make sure your new XML sitemaps are ready to go

Maintain the old URLs in a separate sitemap for faster indexing of redirects

Sam Partland

Know any issues that the new site has as these will affect performance

Sam Partland

Is it worth running campaigns or increasing budget for SEM?

Sam Partland

Planning the redirects

Sam Partland

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/

Sam Partland

Sam Partland

But it’s rarely that easy

Sam Partland

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


Newdomain.com/amazing-article/


Domain.com/new/amazing-article/

2. 1-to-1 Content URL


Newdomain.com/closest-category/


Domain.com/new/closest-category/

3. 1-to-1 Category URL

Only catch-all if you can redirect somewhere related

Sam Partland

Let the developer implement these where possible

Sam Partland

And test them all on a staging site where possible

Sam Partland


Sam Partland

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

Sam Partland

During a migration

Sam Partland

Fetch as Google and submit your sitemaps

Sam Partland

If you changed your domain, submit a ‘change of address’

Sam Partland


• Scan the new site to make sure everything's okay

• Scan all previous URLs to confirm redirects

Sam Partland

Sam Partland

RANKINGS

Sam Partland

Post-migration

Sam Partland

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

Sam Partland

Website organic search traffic would soon follow

• Strip back to a unique identifier

• Analyse at URL level or categorise and view at category level

Sam Partland

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 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





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

Sam Partland

No pre-migration data?

Sam Partland

Sam Partland

Download historic & recent ranking

• Export as much data as possible

• Sort / filter the data to avoid your account limit a bit

Sam Partland

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

Sam Partland

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 4 7000 5 3326.92801 5 3426.92801 Category 4 https://domain.com/url-4 https://domain.com/new-url-4






keyword 10 4500 15 121.5 63 0 Category 10 https://domain.com/url-10 https://domain.com/url-10

And then….

Sam Partland


Sam Partland

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 4 7000 5 3326.92801 5 3426.92801 Category 4 https://domain.com/url-4 https://domain.com/new-url-4






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

Sam Partland

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%)

Sam Partland

Some of my tips

Sam Partland

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)

Sam Partland

Modify category-bases with categorisation formula

Substitute old with new

Categorise with ‘find’

Categorise with ‘category’

Sam Partland

Wordpress plugin to manage redirects & 404s

https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/

https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/

Sam Partland

‘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

http://zoomspring.com/learn-importxml-tutorial/

https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo

Sam Partland

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…

Sam Partland


Sam Partland

And just quickly…

Sam Partland

A new SEO tool to change the way we interpret our data

Sam Partland

Currently keyword & search volume management

Sam Partland

With categorisation of them faster & easier

Sam Partland

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?

website migration seo: advanced migration strategy & analysis

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