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Ep 27 - 7 Essential Steps to Successful SEO Content Migration | Expert Insights Podcast and Video Transcript

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Ep 27 - 7 Essential Steps to Successful SEO Content Migration | Expert Insights

Introduction to SEO Content Migrations

Dave Dougherty: Hey there, what's going on? Dave here doing a kind of a special edition episode of enterprising minds. I'm going to go deep dive into SEO content migrations and my seven step. Plan for them. So you know, as any SEO worth their salt, we've done multiple migrations and they are fraught with whether or not, you do them properly, right? There's some really good upsides. And if they are improperly executed, you can accidentally tank your site. So if you do a quick Google search of, you know, content migration case studies, you will see lots and lots of examples of all those things happening. And yeah, but wanted to quick talk about this and give you my Sort of overall seven step project plan, and you can leverage that your own way and see how that resonates with you.

Understanding the Need for Content Migration

Dave Dougherty: So what is a content migration? Basically, the business need around this is to either reduce the friction for customers to find the information they're looking for on your website. Maybe it's to You know, move a section of one site to another. Maybe the organization has changed. Divisions have changed, you know, all these kinds of normal, normal business things.

A lot of other things that I've been a part of also include mergers and acquisitions. If you or spin outs, spin offs sales of divisions, all of those things. That occur, have to have a content migration and SEO migration plan in place as part of those projects. And a lot of times you actually find that the businesses haven't thought of that full spectrum of what needs to be done.

And this, this can be a problem cause you don't, you end up with digital assets that aren't performing as well as you thought they could or should be so. How do you do it to keep the amount of traffic that you have involved? And you know, like a good doctor do no harm in, in the move. But then also potentially realize the upside of it.

The Seven-Step Plan for SEO Content Migrations

Dave Dougherty: So like I said, I've got a seven step process. We'll, we'll quickly define. What those seven steps are here, and then we'll take some time and do a deep dive on on each particular section.

Step 1: Pre-Work and Discovery

Dave Dougherty: So step number one actually has nothing to do with the migration thing. It is just getting all of your ducks in a row.

It's what I call the pre work. It's the discovery and alignment of any, any project and anybody who's done any kind of project management. Or any kind of stakeholder engagement will understand that this is one of the most essential things because you not only collect all of your, your research or preexisting data, but then you also find the gaps in your knowledge and.

You set the expectations with your stakeholders and your bosses. So this is a necessary step. I mean, even if you're in an agency or if you're in house at a company, this is going to be one of your, your, your main steps. So here you define your project scope and timelines, engage your stakeholders, collect the data.

And establish a rubric for prioritization.

Step 2: Technical Review and Template Building

Dave Dougherty: Step two is more of a technical review and any kind of template building that might be used across the across the project. So that way you can have, you know, uniformity if you are, you know, leveraging this in more than one domain or more than one sales regions.

Having that template piece again.

Step 3: Content Review and Opportunity Identification

Dave Dougherty: Establishes some some expectations and allows for accountability to step three reviewing the content. This is more of the manual work. Also reviewing any opportunities that might exist, you know, while you're doing the big changes. What? What else might you consider as like a wave to opportunity, you know, once you've moved things along as well as any sort of like wireframe mockups, this is going to be an important an important step before that stakeholder management legal reviews, business reviews, any of those kinds of things.

Step 4: Building Your Redirect Strategy

Dave Dougherty: So once you have all that in place, step 4, you can start building your redirect strategy. This is going to be really important in terms of maintaining your equity and any equity that you might have built up over time with your previous site to make sure that the new version of the site or the new area of the site.

Performs in the same way and gets the same love. This also includes creating specific site maps for the project to then submit to Search Console or IndexNow or any of the other search engine webmaster tools.

Step 5: Feedback, Testing, and Rollback Strategy

Dave Dougherty: Step Five, getting the feedback, the testing, and more importantly, something that a lot of people forget about a rollback strategy.

At this stage, you're getting feedback from your stakeholders. This could include local legal. Advisors. This could include business stakeholders to make sure that the new experience matches up with what they're trying to do, what they think and their their go to market strategies, making sure that everybody is on board and happy with with the changes.

The rollback plan is really important because not everything goes the way that we expect. And like I said at the beginning, if you don't do a redirect or content migration thing perfectly You can accidentally de index your entire site or you know, have all of your pages not show up. So really important to be able to undo your changes if something like that occurs or if something breaks with your platform or servers or something like that.

Always have a contingency. All right.

Step 6: Post-Launch Quality Assurance and Activities

Dave Dougherty: Step six, post launch QA and any kind of post launch activities. So that's, you know, making sure that everything is, is live and working and looks the way that you expect and all the forms submit properly and are routing the way that you thought they would when you would, when you initially drew up that plan and then promoting the new site.

Externally to your customers or your channel partners, but then also to your internal audiences, making sure that everybody inside of your organization that shouldn't know about it ends up learning about the work that you just underwent and then step seven.

Step 7: Continuous Monitoring and Improvement

Dave Dougherty: Really important but can get lost in translation is the continuous monitoring and improving of the site.

So like anything, digital marketing, anything, SEO, it is not a one and done. It is a one and many, it is ongoing. It is continually updating and making sure that it, that it works properly. So there you go. That's the step one through seven.

Deep Dive into Each Step

Step 1: Pre-Work and Discovery

Dave Dougherty: We are going to talk more in depth now on each. Section and, you know, if you come to the Dave Verde Media website, the episode page for this particular episode, you will find a infographic version marking down these steps into their component pieces.

If you're a visual learner, you can, you can grab that as well as any You know, links to any resources or, or read the transcript, however you like to learn. So head over to dave doherty, media. com slash enterprising minds, and you will find this episode there. So, all right. So step one, the pre work and discovery So the reason that I bring this up is just to establish all the dates and the timelines.

You know, there's a lot of, a lot of things where you wouldn't necessarily think that they'd be digital marketing related, like, you know, certain vendors have certain shutdown practices and in their contracts. So like in the marketing and acquisition example, right, you sure that you hit those deadlines of 30, 60, 90 days prior to terminating your contract with a particular website vendor or agency provider.

All of that has to be built into your project plan and you know, establishing. You know things that are dependent on one another. So you can say, we're going to tackle this one first so that we can then do, you know, steps three, four, five making sure that all of those things are there, the key stakeholders are brought in, you know, holding the, the, the kickoff meeting, as well as establishing any kind of preexisting documents, like maybe there's keyword maps or keyword research that you, you should definitely have, or URL lists for our, the old experience so that you can, you know, create the one to one the one to one redirect maps and site maps to submit.

So this is, this is a key thing and it's easy to quickly talk about it, but it does take a lot of time, right? Anytime you're dealing with a large group of people, you're going to have to spend a lot of time here and over communicate. That's one of the main things. So a real example here, you know, especially with the vendor contracts and the record retention requirements, if you're shutting down a site, all of those record retention requirements are different by individual countries.

And there's all the different. You know, privacy laws that don't necessarily apply to these types of projects, but they could. So make sure again, you bring in your, your legal stakeholders to make sure that you're doing everything on the up and up. But I was once on a project where my predecessor had like two years to shut down a global batch of websites after an acquisition, it was a 2.

5 billion acquisition and things were very behind schedule. I had nine months to launch 19 websites in 11 languages. And shut down all the agreements and make sure that all of them were up to the standards for the new company. And I, I use this exact this exact plan in order to keep my sanity during that whole time.

So this was, this was where the importance of the local laws and making sure that you stay in the up and up and that you have the it Team involved for the record retentions, archiving the old sites you know, different businesses will have different needs with this, depending on the size of your organization.

So just something to keep in mind there and. You know, definitely pay attention to that kind of thing. Right. The other thing with this pre stage that is super important are creating, creating the rubrics or the methodologies for how you are going to prioritize things. Right.

So generally I like to have three buckets to deciding. What pages are worth keeping versus which ones you should just let die. For example, there are URLs that have business value, so they convert, they drive sales, they drive high value conversions you know, those types of things that really drive a lot of value for the organization. That's priority number one set of URLs, URLs.

Number two would be URLs that have any kind of SEO value, right? They, they drive traffic. They have a lot of backlink equity but they, maybe they don't. Drive a lot of conversion metrics you know, or enough conversions to put them into that high value business bucket. But they could play an important part in the customer journey as well as creating that expertise and authoritativeness that Google wants to see with the, the, the eat model that they're pushing a lot. So number two, of the three buckets is that SEO value. Make sure that you have a solid understanding of your customer journey and where your experience fits in, in those.

And step number three for the value buckets is any of the URLs that provide little or no value, whether it's for business or traffic volume or assisting the customer journey. These are the URLs that you don't have to. Necessarily include in your redirect plan or you know, bring over to the new experience.

You, these, it is okay to let pages die. You know, I know a lot of work goes into launching a page, but sometimes, you know, especially if they've been around for a long time and they're only bringing like 20 visits a month or, you know, some, some low traffic volume. Nah.

Those are the three priority buckets:

1.    URLs that have business value, that's number one.

2.    URLs that have SEO value, but not necessarily a lot of conversion rates

3.    “Let it go” URLs. The ones that provide either no business value or no SEO value to the customer experience.

Step 2: Technical Review and Template Building

So with technical reviews and template building in this section. It depends on the type of you are the type of content migration you're doing, right? So if you're just doing what I call sort of the MVP lift and shifts. Idea where you're just taking this section of a website and moving it over to this next section or this other section you're keeping the content totally the same.

And the only thing that's changing are you know, the URL folder structures that's a lot easier than these larger. Content migration strategies. So a lift and shift. Really? I would look at URL optimization around your keywords and your topic clusters. And You know, optimizing that URL for however your technology stack allows you, right, if you're in a larger enterprise, you know, you might run into some technology problems at this at this stage, but assuming you don't have those problems you know, just lifting and shifting should be really easy because you have that list of URLs from the old experience and then you put in the URLs from the new experience and you're good to go.

Well create your site maps, submit them, you're done. For larger migration strategies, you know, not just the lift and shift, but like you're taking URLs from one domain and putting them on another, or you're taking it from one section to another, but you're retitling or creating a totally new experience based on the customer journey or keyword intents, right? You're taking a new approach to the product or the section of the website that you're talking about. So if that's if that's the case, then are you creating new categories? Like, is it? Is it a blog shift? Or is it a resource documentation shift? Then, you know, pay attention to the categories and how that shows up in the URL you know, do you need to have author pages?

If so, make sure that those are tagged properly and decide whether or not you want author pages to be indexed by the search engines. And if so, how do authors play into your overall content strategy? Also with the resource pages or any kind of you know, support pages that you might be moving over have you thought of how these things actually play into your overall content strategy, right?

If so, are there equivalents of these documents in other languages that or other domains that you might need to implement an international SEO strategy, you know, implementing the hreflang tags, making sure you have your your metalanguage tags in the code. Are there any updates in the robots.txt or sitemap files that might need to be done?

For example you know, in the robots file, are you indexing the author tags? Are you getting, telling it to ignore the, the extra parameters that might be appended to your, your URL because of your technology, all of these things play into that decision making on the front end, right? And, you know, with the URL optimizations and that technology stack, I'm not going to get too, too much into this, but like within your technical review at this stage it's kind of hard to imagine that we're still talking about it, but you know, are you using HTTP two versus HTTP 1.1?

If you're doing two, then there's going to be a lot more security. There's going to be a lot more speed to be have had And I mean, just changing that could could positively impact your organization's metrics. Other core ranking and technical factors, page speed load. You know, how, how multimedia is brought in, whether it's through APIs or You know, embedding the players things like how many server calls to your page templates have within them.

All of these things go into your technical reviews. Other things. The simple things that that can easily be missed, like forcing lowercase in your URLs to make sure you don't have all of the variation that's created from uppercase versus lowercase URLs, but then also forcing a slash at the end, right?

Making sure that you don't have variations on the URLs. With a slash without a slash, because those will be treated as separate pages if, if they're launched and Google has to figure out what, what to do with them.

So you know, making sure you have all of these smaller things that can add up to larger problems making sure that you have those in your checklists, in your your project briefings can, can go a really long way in making sure that you have a successful launch. So you know, there, there's some other things with the technical templates and, and building your templates, other things like schema markup, structured data open graph to make sure that your, your pages, if they are shared socially or via text platforms making sure you have that open graph.

There's going to be really important. Also making sure that any of your analytics tag manager systems or Google analytics codes are properly set up. Before you launch will be really important, right? Cause then you can actually tell your bosses, Hey, this was great. It worked. Also looking into any of your canonicalization logics, this is especially important for e commerce platforms or any kind of e commerce sites to make sure that you have your base variant products set up properly before you, before you launch cause that will affect.

Your syndication strategies to your channel partners or to the shopping channels digitally, like YouTube, TikTok, Amazon, or Mercado Libre, you know, any of those. So the technical review is one thing that can be more quantitative automated, depending on what tools and systems and skill sets you have within your organization you can run that as its own thing and then come into this next step, or if you have, if you have some teammates or you have some agencies assisting you running a content review and more of that, that front end on page side of things, you can run that simultaneously as your, your technical review.

Step 3: Content Review and Opportunity Identification

So with the content reviews and the wireframe mockups, this is really bringing that esoteric. Things that we just talked about, like, you know, backlink logics or canonical logics and code structures and all those things, bringing that to life for normal human beings to enjoy and get a sense of isn't, is important, right?

So Content template elements to consider. Is it what content type is it? Is it a blog? Is it a longer form article? Is it a podcast and podcast transcripts? Is it a white paper, ebook, any kind of thing like that? That is its own content type deserves its own content template. This is not just for setting expectations with your internal stakeholders, but also with your customers and to differentiate the content across your, your website and your content experiences for your customers.

Here, you know, your style and brand guides are going to come into play. What is the purpose of the page? Is it to drive conversions or is it more of a high-level awareness page that you really just expect to establish the brand in your customers minds and then you move along, or you know, where in that customer journey does this particular page fit?

You know, not every page is going to be a silver bullet. Right. That's why you need to have that ecosystem of content built up. But along with the page purpose, how are you supporting that purpose? Does that, is that that page's purpose supported by videos, by a rich product? Content by podcast player embeds, you know, all of these things go into reinforce that message and that experience.

So making sure that you have those included is going to be important. Any kind of keyword map to set yourself up for keyword tracking and, and. Those sorts of things are going to be important in the stage two. And then any of the content that you want included on the particular page to make sure that your copywriters know to write the things properly or your agency partners, you know, these are the things that we want delivered for every single page. All that's going to be really important.

One thing that I like to include in this spot is to generate any ideas for either repurposing a page or content that could be created to support this page. So you know, maybe, maybe it would be smart to have Three or four blog posts that can go more in depth on the topics that your website page talk about, but the page would be way too long if you included all of that on your sort of pillar page.

Right? So. This can be an important thing to discuss with your business stakeholders to make sure they understand. Don't throw the kitchen sink at one page, right? You can build a larger experience and should build a larger experience so that it's just better for the search engines and the customers.

Yeah, so this, this is a lot of manual work and it's a lot of, you know, poking around and, and dealing with image sizes and. And all of those, those things, but it, it really does make a difference. And it goes a long way to making sure that you have all of the proper feedback and getting feedback quickly from your internal stakeholders, because you know, a lot of people are visual, so they're going to be able to look at the page and go, yep, this meets standards, we can go through that.

Step 4 and 5: Feedback, Building Your Redirect Strategy, Testing, and Rollback Strategy

So, and that's actually the next step, right? So getting feedback from your internal stakeholders is super important.

At this stage, you've just done a ton of work. If you've, you know, set up the expectations with them, you've built your templates, you've done your auditing that. Is a huge amount of work. So just making sure you get another set of eyes to, to look at what you have set up, get the approval, make sure things are going in the right direction.

This is an important point. And it's also. At this stage, this allows you to take a little bit of a breath, go get a cup of coffee you know, maybe a cookie or two and yeah, recognize a lot of the work that goes into that. So once you get the approvals to move forward, now we get into more of that execution stage, right?

So you're 301 redirect strategy. This is where any of that pre work you did really comes into play, right? Having that URL lists of a from two is going to be super important here. And then from those URL lists, once you have each page mapped to the new experience with the new URL building out.

Individual site maps to then submit to the various webmaster tools or webmaster like tools provided by Google being Baidu, you know, any of those search engines is, is really fundamental built off of this. Right. Making sure that you don't have any redirect chains occurring. So, you know, you go from URL a, which goes to URL B, but then you have a redirect set up on URL B that goes to URL a right.

The equity never lands anywhere there. The user never lands anywhere with with that setup. So making sure you break that so that it is literally a point A to point B for the web experience is super important. And that way. You know, all the new pages get as much love as possible. At this point with your redirect strategy, if you don't have a one to one page experience, it is okay to go up to the next best level.

So this could be a category page. This could be within a catalog. This could be a topic category page in a blog or a resource section. You know, try to think of the experience from your user's point of view. Does it make sense? If I'm expecting page a to go to this particular topic and you'll have to look at what your products and services are to make that make that distinction.

But really, it's it's important that you have this redirect strategy or direct mapping set up as as much as possible.

And then setting up your testing and your rollback plan. So what does QA look like? What are the particular events that will trigger a rollback plan? You know, is it an accidental no index or a disallow all that has happened to a lot of organizations?

If you see that the sooner you you shut that off, the better. You'll limit your damage quite a bit by doing that. And it also just expect it, it sets up that expectation of, okay, we're going to be on top of this. We have a plan for how to do this properly. Let's go do it. So a real world example with this to try to get it less esoteric here.

I was once part of a, Website migration that was essentially 90 million URLs. It was a huge e commerce site across many, many, many, many, many, many global domains and many, many languages. So it was like 50 different languages. And. The way the backend was set up, we had to get it done correctly. And, and like once the switch was flipped, it was done, it was out.

So it had to be correct. The thing that we did in order to minimize our risk here was to take a couple of. Sort of non priority countries that weren't necessarily really strategically important to the organization and do a dry run or a test of the of the, the project rollout in that country, you know country like Kazakhstan or, or something like that, where, you know.

May or may not be important depends on what your business is, right? So if you take a, if you take a country domain like that or your own testing site or something like that and, and do a dry run of it, you can see where things break and you can shut it off without having a huge impact to your organization, right?

Like if you were to do this into, you know, one of the, the larger areas like or larger economies, Like the U S Germany, Brazil, Japan, like that can do a ton of damage to, to your digital marketing capabilities. So find a way to pilot or do a dry run before you launch it's, it's essential and you learn a lot by doing that. So highly recommend that if you're able to do that.

Step 6: Post-Launch Quality Assurance and Activities

Now, so we're getting towards we're getting towards the end. So thank you for sticking in here. Now we are at the post launch quality assurance and post launch activities. Again, this is going to be working through anything that might have fallen through the cracks because, you know, as You can tell by listening to this, there's a lot of things to think about throughout this whole process and a lot of, you know, eyes to dot and T's to cross.

So it's, it's important that you bake this in just to make sure that things are correct, right? You've done your QA prelaunch, but you know full well that something probably fell through the cracks and maybe you've done your, your. Your pilot and you identified some things, but there's still going to be some things that fall through.

So some post launch activities that I like to include are again, creating and submitting those site maps based on your redirect projects, making sure that those are up and running and crawled properly, right? Making sure there's no crawling errors there. Using a tool like Screaming Frog or enterprise level crawling tools like like Botify or Conductor, I think, or what?

Anyway you can, you can find a lot of them. Any of the SEO tools that have a crawling functionality. Work here and it depends on the size of your site, right? If you have a huge e commerce site, I would go with the enterprise tool over screaming frog because that'll take forever. But screaming frogs, a great tool for almost everything else.

But make sure the technical setups are correct. So things like status code errors, page load time in links, external links, any canonical link. Issues. One pro tip with screaming frog is including the Google lighthouse API into the crawl prior to setting it off. This allows you to check all the core web vitals and the status of those things in bulk.

So you won't get the recommendations like you do if you were to use it on a single page. But. Getting the metrics in bulk to be able to then, you know, leverage your tools like big query or Power BI to tell you more things about that can be really, really helpful here. So troubleshooting any broken URLs, broken links, any broken forms that, that aren't working properly, any of your button or Screen overlays or anything that like that that's vital to the way your business either collects leads, generates leads or scores your leads digitally is going to be really important here to troubleshoot that right away.

Step 7: Continuous Monitoring and Improvement

And then launching any post launch promotion, right? Again, this is not only to your new and potential customers your existing customers, but then also your internal stakeholders in your organization, right? You want to celebrate the all the hard work that you just did that all that your team just did and making sure that everybody is aware that we're live.

We did it. It's going well. And that way, More people can talk about it. More people can, can build that hype for it. So you know, emailing people where appropriate channel partners customers or salespeople internally leveraging social media, chat apps like Slack or you know, WhatsApp or however your organization is set up, you know, leveraging those things is going to be important.

Because you want to celebrate you want to you want to bring bring as many eyeballs to all of your hard work as possible, right? So, and finally, just that continuous monitoring improvement, right? Knowing that you get through the project is fantastic. You've just done a bunch of work. It's a hard project.

You just did it. It's great. But then. Is it being crawled and indexed the way you thought? Is it having the business impact that you thought it would? If not, what are those opportunities that you've identified in the process that you can now launch with the new experience? Can you, can you write new blogs?

Can you do some social posts to promote the, the new experience, or maybe you got some feedback from customers that you now need to incorporate into your, your new designs or. You know, you're launching a B testing to make sure that you can improve either click throughs or higher engagement scores.

So all of those things are, are super important.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Dave Dougherty: So man, okay. So I know that was a lot. Thank you for sticking through we're. Just a quick summarize again, the seven steps to really consider and to, to, to work through a content migration strategy with search optimization involved. Step one, pre work project discovery and alignment.

Step two, technical. Review auditing and template building three content review content opportunity, identification and wireframe design mock ups. You know, getting that UX strategy involved with your, your SEO strategy, super important step four, three Oh one redirect strategy and sitemap creation for post launch indexing step five.

Feedback testing and a rollback contingency plan just in case something goes horribly, horribly wrong. But if you've paid a lot of attention, you might, you shouldn't have that problem. Step six. Post launch quality assurance, QA activities and post launch promotional activities. So you know, submitting the site maps, conducting technical review crawls to troubleshoot issues, launching Marketing or advertising that promotes the new experience, you know, all of those things stakeholder engagement, reach out and step seven, continually monitoring and improving the experience so that you can have a richer engagement, richer Experience for your customers.

So thank you. I know that was a lot. Thank you for paying attention. Let me know any thoughts, comments, feedback on this. Do you use something similar to this? Have you run through things like this? If so, you know, let me know. Drop a comment. The email is in the episode description. Let us know what you think.

Like subscribe, share all of those good things. Let me know what's up and let me know if you like this format. If doing a deep dive in a particular topic is worthwhile, you know, let me know, and we can come up with a lot more ideas around this vein. So thanks so much. And we will see you in the next episode of enterprising minds.

Take care.