How To Successfully Undertake Site Migrations - Search London 2017

@chloebodard | #brightonseo
How to Successfully
Undertake Site
Migrations
@chloebodard@chloebodard | #SearchLondon www.ricemedia.co.uk

● Why Migrate?
● Planning
● Pre Live Checklist
● Go Live Checklist
● Post Live Checklist
● What’s Next?
Site Migrations

Why Migrate?
HTTPS
August 2014, Google announced that site using HTTPS site would
benefit from minor boost in rankings, hoping to encourage a safer
web.
Rebranding & Re-design
Changing Top Level Domain (TLD)
Going international? Change targeting and add hreflang tags
@chloebodard | #SearchLondon@chloebodard | #SearchLondon www.ricemedia.co.uk

Risks
@chloebodard
● Missing 301s, 404s & broken links
● Content duplication
● Robots & Sitemap issues
● Tracking issues
@chloebodard | #SearchLondon www.ricemedia.co.uk

@chloebodard | #brightonseo@chloebodard
Site migration
rushed - resulted
in lots of redirect
chains/broken
redirects
Redirect chains
and broken
redirects fixed
Migrations Can Go Wrong

Pre Go Live

Pre Go Live Checklist
@chloebodard
1. Homepage Design & Content
2. Navigation, URL structure &
Optimisation
3. Crawl Current Website URLs
4. Redirects
5. Canonical Tags
6. Robots.txt File
7. Sitemap.xml
8. Schema Markup
9. 404s
10. Mobile & Page Speed
11. Goals & Event Tracking

Planning
@chloebodard
● Keyword research & GA
○ Identify key pages
○ Url structure & Site Hierarchy
○ Sitemap
○ Benchmark rankings
● Competitor analysis
○ Use their knowledge & experience to your advantage
● UX
○ User friendly
○ Think about the user journey
○ CTAs
● For new domains, audit domain - previous penalties? Audit backlinks - get disavow ready

Planning
@chloebodard
● Crawl your site
○ Gather all urls
● Look in GA
○ Identify your top landing pages
● Map out your 301s
○ Assign a corresponding new site URL (or best option) to all current URLs to be
301 redirected.
● Verify new site domain in Search Console
Where to Start?

Optimisation
@chloebodard
● URL structure
● Navigation
● Meta tags
● Heading tags
● Content
● Interlinking
● Alt tags
● CTAs

● Missing page titles/meta descriptions/ H1s - use SF SERP Summary report
● Duplicate page titles/meta descriptions/ H1s - use SF SERP Summary report
● Lack of keyword targeting
● Meta tags improvements - use SC Search Analytics Report
● Internal cannibalisation - use GA landing page organic traffic & check
rankings
What To Look At For Improvements?

● Ensure ALL pages have a unique Page title, meta description and H1s.
○ Targeted keyword should be at the start of the page title & in the H1
○ Look at top rankers !!
○ Seize improvement opportunities from SC
○ Make meta descriptions engaging & with a CTA.
○ Include KW & semantic variations in H2s
● Ensure page titles & meta descriptions are within recommended length (up to 61-63
characters now)
● Ensure each page targets a different phrase to avoid internal cannibalisation
● Push pages ranking on top of page 2 to page 1
Get New Site Optimisation Right

Use Screaming Frogs List Mode to
crawl your list of URLs.
Make sure ‘Always Follow Redirects’ is ticked in Settings.
(Configuration > Spider > Advanced)
● Paste/Upload all URLs into a spreadsheet
● Identify current redirects to avoid redirect chains
Crawl your Site

301 Redirects Tips
@chloebodard
● No blanket redirect to the homepage!
● Setup page-to-page 301 permanent redirects to new
corresponding pages (not 302 temporary redirects!) - don’t forget
images!
● Ensure site-wide 301 redirects are set up from non-preferred to
preferred versions (www, https & trailing slashes)
● Prevent redirect chains - URLs should 301 redirect straight to the
final version (remember to update internal links)
● Map Redirects for key 404s (esp. Backlinks or Landing Page 404s)

● Ensure canonicals point to the preferred version of
the site (esp. Important after https migration)
● Use absolute URLS
● Should NOT point to 404s or 301s
● Listing URLs should not be canonicalised to the
first page - use rel=prev and rel=next tags!
Canonical Tags

Tech changes made and canonicals set to non
preferred (http) version
Canonicals updated to
avoid 301s and point
to preferred version
(https)
Canonical Tags Matter!

● Hide / Disallow the staging site!
○ password protect the staging/new site and add the Disallow : /
directive to robots.txt
** DON’T FORGET TO REMOVE IT ON GO LIVE **
● Get a list of unwanted URLs ( for users only) that you’ll want to add
to it (wish list urls, admin urls etc)
● Sitemap reference will need to be added too
Robots.txt File

● Best type of Sitemap is dynamic - automatically updates!
● Only include canonical URLs, don’t include 404, 301s or canonicalised
URLs
● Beware of orphaned URLs that you may not want to be indexed
● Include an accurate Last Modified Date and Location of the URL
● Make sure your key pages are in there & use child sitemaps to separate
sections/large list of URLs.
● If multiple types of content, use additional sitemap types (image, video &
mobile )
● All URLs in the sitemap should be linked internally
Sitemap.xml

● It’s a way to annotate the code of your website so that Google
understands your data better through adding markup tags within a
page’s HTML.
● These include products, local business, breadcrumbs and many others.
● Search engines use the tags that they find on pages to generate rich
snippets for search results in Google.
● These can then help increase CTR from SERPs.
More Information : http://schema.org/Organization
Schema Markup (Structured Data)

● 404s do not negatively affect SEO but do affect the user
experience
● Incorrect URLs should contain a 404 HTTP status code & display
a page not found error. They SHOULD NOT redirect
● Create a custom 404 page that displays links to other pages that
users could visit & keep same header / footer.
404 Error Handling

Google announced that they intend to switch to a mobile-first index:
● Website should use a responsive design - same code is present on all devices
● Mobile website should include same content as desktop, DO NOT remove
important links or hide content on some devices
Page Speed has been a ranking signal since 2010 & also affects UX
● Test your page speed (webpagetest, gtmetrix, pingdom, page speed insights)
● Make sure that the server is as optimised as possible for speed
● Website Page Speed Improvements
Mobile & Page Speed

● GA tracking code to be added on Go live to every page, right
before the </head> tag.
● Test with google tag assistant
● Set up goals - or ecomm tracking
○ Destination urls
○ Event tracking
Adwords? Don’t forget to change destination URLs!!!
Tracking & Goals

Go Live

BRAUMGroup 24
Ready to go live?
@chloebodard
● Add the GA tracking code
● Check goals are set up
● Remove blanket noindex tags
● Remove disallow directive from robots.txt file
● Check 301 Redirects are added and ready to go
● Complete a final crawl. Check/fix any remaining issues
● Save the last crawl (to run again post migration)
● Backup your website (in case anything goes wrong)

Post Go Live

● Check GA tracking code
● Use Fetch & Render & Submit URLs
● Submit Sitemap in SC
● Add an annotation in GA (to track the go live date)
● Check goal tracking is working
● Check robots.txt file
● Crawl New Site - Check for issues such as 404s or internal redirects
● Crawl Old URLs - Check the redirects are working as expected
● Check Canonicals
● Update important Backlinks
Post Go Live Checklist - Same Domain

Extra steps for a HTTPS migration
● Verify HTTPS versions of the domain (e.g https://, https://www) in Search Console. Don’t
remove the HTTP versions.
● Update Google Analytics settings & reconnect to Search Console
● Group all versions (http & https) within a Property Set in Search Console
● Upload disavow file for new domain
● Re-apply any advanced settings in Search Console e.g Parameters and Country
Targeting
● Ensure all URL within the sitemap are on https as otherwise http urls could get indexed
Post Go Live Checklist - HTTPS Migration

Extra steps for a Domain migration
● Verify all Search Console versions for the new domain e.g https, http, http://www,
https://www (don’t remove the previous domain versions!)
● Submit ‘Change of Address’ request in Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools
● Update Google Analytics settings & reconnect to Search Console
● Group old and new domain versions (http & https) in Property Set in Search Console
● Upload disavow file for new domain
● Re-apply any advanced settings in Search Console e.g Parameters and Country
Targeting
● Update Citations e.g Google My Business links
Post Go Live Checklist - Domain Change

Check Your Sitemap
Use DeepCrawl Sitemap report to:
● Highlight any orphaned URLs to be linked
● Pages missing from your sitemap to be added
● Errors within its pages to be fixed
Use Search console to submit it & check for errors:
● Check for warnings & follow recommendations
● Look at number of URLs submitted vs indexed

● Errors in your sitemap, such as 404, 301s or canonicalised URLs
● Orphaned URLs that you may / may not want to be indexed
● Missing/inaccurate Last Modified Date
● Missing key pages
● Noindex pages & URLs blocked by robots.txt file
Issues To Look For in Sitemap?
@chloebodard | #BrightonSeo@chloebodard | #SearchLondon www.ricemedia.co.uk

Monitor Sitemap Indexing

Option 1:
Use the robots.txt tester in Search
Console - this requires the robots.txt file
to be actually updated.
Option 2:
Use the custom robots.txt tool in
Screaming Frog to test then and there.
Check the commands you are adding will
work for the URLS you want to block.
@chloebodard
Test Your Robots.txt File

● Disallowing full site post migration?
● Disallowing CSS/JS files?
● Disallowing unexpected URLs?
Issues To Look For In Your Robots.txt File

Use Screaming Frogs List Mode to
crawl your list of URLs.
Make sure ‘Always Follow Redirects’ is ticked in Settings.
(Configuration > Spider > Advanced)
● Paste/Upload old URLs
● Update Redirects which have multiple Redirect Chains
● Create Redirects for key 404s (esp. Backlink or Landing Page 404s)
● Fix broken/incorrect Redirects
● Download the final redirect chain reports
Crawl your URLs + Check 301s & 404’s

@chloebodard | #brightonseo@chloebodard@chloebodard | #SearchLondon www.ricemedia.co.uk

Check Canonicals
Run a DeepCrawl Canonical Report to highlight:
● canonical errors,
● orphaned canonical URLs
● pages without a valid canonical tag
Use Screaming Frog to:
● Identify canonicalised URLs
● Check for errors by exporting the Canonical Errors report

● Gather backlink URLs via tools such as Majestic
● Update high quality backlinks to final destination if possible
● Update local citations if domain name changes including GMB
● Update social Profiles
Backlinks

What’s Next?

Crawl, re-crawl, keep
checking indexing,
rankings, visibility and
traffic!

● Monitor indexing, visibility & rankings
● Update meta tags and heading tags based on rankings
● Work on on site content - on page & blog articles
● Work on internal linking
● Work on outreach and link building
● Carry out technical checks (check 404s, 301s, new issues?)
What’s Next?

Case Study
@chloebodard
● Recently migrated 7 separate websites towards a single domain.
● The main site was completely restructured, with the other sites being
smaller branches of the brand that were migrated to a single site.
● This involved a massive amount of planning beforehand, including
extensive URL mapping and staging site tech check and analysis.

+400%
Organic traffic since the
migration
@chloebodard
Migration Results

+93%
Increase in organic traffic
New Site Design & TLD
● Page 1 rankings for all key pages.
● Organic traffic is up 92.92% year
on year
● Organic enquiries increased
333% YoY
@chloebodard

BRAUMGroup 44
● Homepage Design & Content
● Navigation & URL structure
● Crawl Current Website URLs
● Map 301 Redirects
● Canonical Tags
● Optimisation
● Sitemap.xml
● Robots.txt File
Migration Checklists
Pre Go Live
@chloebodard
● Goals & Event Tracking
● Schema Markup
● Mobile
● Unnecessary Redirects
● Calls to Action
● 404’s
● Page Speed

BRAUMGroup 45
Go Live
● Sitemap.xml
● Robots.txt File
● 301 Redirects
● GA Tracking Code
● Mobile Site
● Website Crawl

BRAUMGroup 46
Post Go Live
@chloebodard
● Submit Sitemap
● Old URLs crawl
● New site crawl
● Robots.txt file check
● GA tracking code check
● Fetch & Render
● Data Highlighting
● Search Console Settings
● Backlinks updates
● Disavow file upload

Thank You!

How To Successfully Undertake Site Migrations - Search London 2017

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How To Successfully Undertake Site Migrations - Search London 2017