1. Misvaluing your current digital assets
Migrations are often the final step of an exciting journey of page redesigns, user research and refreshing your brand. One common pitfall however is to only focus on the new, and forget the old until it’s too late. (Planning will be a major theme in this post!)
Your current site content holds significant value as digital assets, including:
- Keywords it ranks for
- Traffic quality (conversion rate, bounce rate, engagement)
- Revenue and conversions
- Backlinks
A major redesign or change in how you communicate your products and services can disrupt this value, resulting in the loss of valuable digital assets.
The job is to understand this across the whole site, and ensure that the value of your current asset is defended as much as possible.
2. Poor Redirect Hygiene
When changing the information architecture of a website, URLs are often affected. This includes content moving to new URLs, new content being added, and old content being retired.
Established domains may have multiple historical redirects. Avoid having a large redirect list containing all previous and new redirects.
A migration is a good time to tidy all of these up, auditing historical redirects and there are some good reasons:
- Google’s crawlers won’t follow redirect chains longer than five steps.
- A large redirect file may slow server response times.
- Users being redirected multiple times can increase server load and response times.
- A 302 temporary redirect anywhere in the chain will prevent indexation.
Speed is often one reason to upgrade website technology – don’t overlook the server response savings that can be made here.
In summary: Avoid redirect chains, and avoid huge redirect files.
3. Incomplete redirect mapping
How important is redirect mapping during a migration? It’s the most important aspect to get right! The ‘gotcha’ pitfall that brands find themselves in here is incomplete content mapping.
It’s essential that all content which has a reasonable home on the new site is 301 redirected to the new URL. Any content which is not being redirected should be due to a deliberate decision to retire that page and a decision agreed with your SEO to either allow it to 404 or to redirect to the homepage or near-equivalent, usually depending on whether the page has backlinks.
Missing redirects due to incomplete redirect mapping results in essentially being wiped from the internet – resulting in a loss of digital assets.
4. You forgot to tell SEO
Exciting migration stuff is underway – pages are being wireframed or even designed, creative is being worked on, and developers are working on the CMS! Wait – did anyone tell SEO?
Involve your SEO right from the inception of the migration – the work the SEO does is more than redirect mapping, and the SEO is one of the keys to unlocking value creation during a migration.
Here are some early migration efforts your SEO can add value to
- Sitemaps
- Page wireframes
- Copy & creative briefs
Your SEO can ensure that important SEO considerations are included at this early stage, both to maximise value creation during the migration but also to prevent expensive amends later on down the line.
By forgetting to involve SEO early-on in migration work, you may trigger costly changes later on in the roadmap, or worse have to go live on a deadline with a website that will impact traffic and thus the business bottom line.
5. Analytics implementation was an afterthought
Most brands know benchmarking performance before then running analysis during and after the migration is essential to understand the impact its having on users and business performance.
The ‘gotcha’ however is overlooking the actual implementation of your analytics tracking, and if it will provide you with meaningful comparisons.
Important website events, including conversions, are often renamed and recategorised during a migration, making comparisons more cumbersome and difficult.
Where possible, look to use the same analytics tags and employ a proper staging test environment to build tracking consistency from old to new to help with performance analysis.
Summary
We have probably seen everything when it comes to migrations, with case studies for international website migration and improving performance following an SEO migration.
Hopefully this article reminded you of something that has been overlooked and you can work to retain or recover the value of your digital asset!
If you are planning a migration, are underway, or even had a migration go badly and want a chat, get in touch.
– or if you have recently carried out a migration and performance isn’t what you expected, get in touch.
