Take SEO more seriously during a migration or relaunch

Andor says: “My tip is regarding migrations and relaunches. If you're a company that relies heavily on SEO in your marketing mix and you are planning a relaunch, then you should take SEO seriously from the very beginning.

You should invest in additional tools you have not yet used and get external support during that period.”

Why are additional tools required?

“Additional tools will help you challenge yourself, or the SEO team involved. Sometimes you have a blind spot. You use the same tools again and again. Especially during a migration, where a lot of things are changing, it helps to add additional data layers.

Also, tools do not always show you the same things. Sometimes they interpret data a little bit differently. Some tools show things that others don’t and, when you are migrating, you want to have the best possible setup.

I’m not necessarily talking about tools for performance and measuring rankings and traffic. I’m mostly referring to tools that can be helpful from a technical point of view: crawling, indexing, etc. It really is helpful to add tools and get different data layers because will see more information, or the same information presented differently. That makes you more aware of the changes that have happened.

It's not so much about the performance; that can be measured and monitored in one tool. However, if you test things, it is really important to add new tools.”

How can migrations go wrong if you do not take SEO seriously enough?

“We have seen several migrations that went utterly wrong in 2023, from an SEO perspective. Some of them could have been prevented if the tool stack had been extended, in my opinion.

There was a migration in Germany where a huge e-commerce company did a relaunch on three of their websites, and they all had the same problem. 80% of their entire website got de-indexed after the migration because a second tab was opened within the source code that had a noindex tag. Google recognised that and simply threw them out of the index. That could have been recognisable with some SEO tools.

We also saw a relaunch where a huge loss of visibility happened because the interlinking scheme was heavily changed during their migration. If you looked at the website before and after it was quite clear that a lot of prioritisations had been moved and things like that. That can again be spotted with the right tools. The guys from Gieves & Hawkes in Savile Row, London relaunched their website and they just placed a static ‘coming soon’ page on it for several weeks, and they lost everything.”

Is that something that could easily be recovered from, or would it take weeks or months to get the traffic back?

“It depends on the case. In the noindex example, you can probably recover from that quite easily because, if you remove the noindex, you will be recrawled and hopefully get back to where you were before, if the migration went okay.

If you present a static ‘coming soon’ page, it definitely depends on what the website looks like after that. However, that page shouldn't be appearing in 2023 and beyond. If you remove entire sections of your website, though, then you will lose that organic reach and the connected traffic and revenue. That is also important during the migration process.

Make it clear to everyone that, if changes are made on content or specific sections are removed that have driven revenue before, this might be going away after the migration.”

Is there a typical type of migration that tends to be an issue?

“There are a lot of different types of migration, and it’s common sense in SEO that you don’t want to be doing everything at the same time.

It could be essentially a re-brush that happens on the same system, which is just a change of layout. That could be one part. It could be a domain switch, where everything stays the same, but you move from one domain to another because you changed your brand or you go from a country code top-level domain to a generic domain.

There can also be a mixture of changing content, changing domains, and changing URLs. These are oftentimes the most complex migrations, and where it might make sense to do some things before the big change and some things after. That way, you can better understand what impact the changes have actually had.”

What tools would you recommend SEOs try?

“It does depend on the tools that you already have, so let me explain the different categories.

You definitely need at least one, if not two, tools that are related to crawling, indexing and all of that. You also definitely need something for performance and for monitoring site speed. You definitely want log files to be involved, at least if you are a domain of a certain size.

Then, you can go deeper into tools that you have developed yourself and smaller things. There are a lot of good solutions out there. Oncrawl is a tool that I use, but there are so many good crawling tools and suites outside of that. Just look at what suits you best.”

How can an SEO ensure that they're aware of all the changes that departments are making that could impact organic success?

“Generally speaking, clear and transparent communication is one of the most important things for a migration process. You need to communicate precisely and transparently what is actually happening, what your expectations are, and the expectations of others as well.

We often just see the website from an SEO perspective but, when a migration or relaunch happens, it's both an opportunity and a risk for the company. They may have the website as a central point at the very beginning and then decide that they could use the same data for other applications as well. They may want to move away from a monolith CMS system to a headless system.

Then, there will obviously be a lot of expectations and requirements from other departments. Every company should keep in mind that they need to get all these expectations together and they need to understand them. SEO needs to have its share of that responsibility and understand what expectations others have, which might match with your own.

SEOs definitely need to understand what the revenue driver is. If it is SEO and the website, and you are entering a process where a lot of other things get involved, you need to communicate that this is the most important channel for revenue. Let other departments know that they should have this in mind when they make decisions.”

Is revenue how an SEO should communicate with a business leader about the potential downside of a migration?

“Yes, because revenue is the most important metric or KPI for C-level. There are a lot of things that come after that but, if you have the information about revenue, that is very important. If your data is good enough, you can segment revenue to specific sectors of the website (such as specific topics or products), and they can be discussed during the process.

You can always refer to that and say, ‘X topic makes 20% of our revenue. If we remove that, we not only lose the revenue we have right now, but we also may lose all potential revenue within that topic.’ A lot of the time, SEOs think in terms of our own internal KPIs but, at a higher level, revenue is the most important thing.”

How much time do you need to plan for a migration?

“Again, it depends on the size of the domain. If your website is not that big – you are a small company and you have a highly engaged team – 3-6 months can be enough, as long as everyone is really focused. A migration or relaunch always means that resources are focused on that specific topic. That means that other projects will be on hold. For a smaller website, that time commitment can be around 3-6 months.

Bigger migrations will definitely take 12 months or even longer. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.

Some SEOs are given a lot less time than 3 months. In that case, if SEO is a revenue driver and an important part of your marketing mix, you will probably pay for it with missing revenue after the migration.”

If the migration has gone relatively well, is there anything that you have to keep track of?

“From my experience, if the migration went badly, you would see that immediately – within the first few days. As long as everything looks fine during that period, I would say that you have done well. After migration, even if you have a very good project plan, you have set milestones, and you know what you want to achieve during the migration, you may still need to reschedule measures and move them to the post-migration period. That can happen.

Then everyone will be relieved, and things can often get fixed faster. At that point, you simply need to make clear what is really important; what are the must-haves and what needs to be done. Otherwise, the migration needs to be rescheduled. Whatever is just nice to have can be done after the migration.

There should at least be a certain amount of post-migration monitoring for log files, ranking, traffic, and things like that. That should always be in place.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2024?

“First, get more tools involved as soon as possible. You will probably discover new things that can help you with your communication. If you use the same tool set, again and again, all your direct reports know them as well. There will be a lack of awareness for certain things.

If you change the way you present your data, you can get new and fresh awareness. It will help you during a migration period so, if you have a migration coming up, you should definitely do that.

You should also really stress internally that everything needs to be tested and this will take time – and that you will probably lose some of your resources and projects when you move your capacity to the migration.”

Andor Palau is an International SEO Consultant, and you can find him over at AndorPalau.com.