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Managing Successful SEO Migrations

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Managing Successful SEO Migrations

As SEO professionals, we are no strangers to migrations and the various levels of volatility they can bring.

Migrations are naturally occurring events in the life cycle of digital businesses as both technology and business objectives advance.

A migration, despite its impact on SEO, can enhance visitor experience if done correctly.

Upgrading to a faster host may increase your ranking performance over time (by influencing and providing better user signals).

Although initial re-indexing by Google may cause a temporary decline in organic traffic, a well-executed migration plan can maintain or even improve your SERP standings.

Defining The Migration Type

A website migration involves a substantial change to a website’s technology, structure, design, or location to enhance online visibility.

Each type of migration carries a certain level of risk, and when you begin to stack different migration types (and change more variables), the risks don’t stack, they begin to amplify.

As SEO professionals, some of the more common migrations we’re used to being involved with include:

In the industry, we hear about migrations going wrong, namely when they start to impact the world outside of SEO.

Losing some traffic and a few rankings isn’t headline news, but businesses closing down stores and laying off staff is.

Examples of this include the Homebase HTTPS migration (as covered in-depth by Omi Sido here) and the more recent Logojoy to Looka rebrand, which, when looking through the eyes of third-party tools, shows a decrease in ranking keywords of 25,000 (150k to 125k).

Scoping An SEO Migration

For me, getting the scoping of a migration correct is essential to the success of the migration process as a whole, and important in avoiding situations like this:

Example of a site migration where SEO consultancy was brought in too late, and after all key decisions had been made.

A key part of the scoping and specifications is that it needs to be actionable for both developers and wider stakeholders:

  • Reducing the “why.”
  • And focusing more on the “how.”

Ambiguity creates risk. The less room for misinterpretation, the better.

Within the scoping document, it’s essential to establish:

  • The reasons for the migration taking place (from the client).
  • Primary and secondary stakeholders.
  • The scope of activities and responsibilities from each stakeholder (maintaining traffic and rankings is not a responsibility, it’s an objective).
  • The timeline for activities, plus post-migration resources.
  • Agreed-upon (by all parties) objectives of the migration.
  • Reporting frequency and depth.

From this, you can begin to create a schedule of activities to reduce as much risk as possible.

SEO Migration Risk Mitigation

For the most part, risk mitigation during any migration is carrying out what is, for many, general migration activities.

Each activity, however, is designed to reduce elements of risk and work toward achieving the agreed-upon objectives.

Redirects

It’s a given that redirects are part of almost all migrations.

However, having performed a number of post-migration traffic drop audits, here are some common errors made when scoping and implementing redirects.

Redirects serve as navigational guides for both browsers and search engines, providing information about a webpage’s location based on a given URL.

They represent coded instructions assigned to specific URLs, or a set of them, rerouting the user or search engine from the original input or clicked URL to a different page.

For migrations where URLs change, Google has stated it can take up to 180 days for the value to fully pass from A to B.

Depending on your migration, the scope of your redirects will change.

JS, CSS, Parameters & Media Files Not Redirected

More often than not, when migration is carried out, people focus on redirecting the URLs – as those are what rank – but you should also be looking at redirecting your JS files, CSS, Parameter URLs, and media files (images, videos) if necessary.

A lot of people question the value of redirecting images, but a URL is a URL, and Google will have crawled it. Google has even recommended that you should redirect image URLs.

Environment Changes

When migrating to a new platform, redesigning templates, or updating the site structure, it’s important to ensure that the new “environment” mirrors the SEO qualities of the previous, at a minimum.

Oftentimes the new platform goes live, and a lot of content is hidden behind JavaScript expandable areas, and with NoScript or JS disabled, it remains hidden – or other key elements have been missed.

So, it’s important to audit the new environment to check that:

  • Metadata has been carried over correctly.
  • Structured data has been implemented and is validated.
  • Canonicals are correct.
  • Pagination mark-up is correct (Bing exists, too!).
  • Internal linking has been carried over and points to 200 URLs.
  • XML and HTML sitemaps are present.
  • Hreflang is set up correctly (if you’re an international website).
  • Redirects have been tested.
  • Your 404 page returns a 404 response code.

Some things, like site speed, will require live site testing unless the staging and pre-production environments are on mirrored stacks (so you can emulate the same performance). But more often than not, they’re not on performance-orientated servers.

Understanding Why Migrations Go Wrong

Oftentimes when a migration goes wrong, it can be pinpointed to at least one of seven reasons, these being:

  • Incorrect SEO strategy or unclear objectives.
  • Poor planning and scoping of resources and timeline.
  • Unforeseen UX or design changes that impact content or code.
  • Involving the SEO agency too late or after key decisions have already been set in stone.
  • Poor or lack of sufficient testing.
  • Slow responses and low development priority to post-migration bug fixes.
  • Uncontrollable variables (e.g., Google update).

Poor Strategy

Understanding why the migration is taking place and the desired outcomes is critical in order to set measurable benchmarks for “success.”

For most migrations, the objective is to maintain SEO performance and then use said stability as a foundation for growth.

However, each migration type has its own set of risks. These need to be communicated to the client and wider stakeholders.

If you’re moving hosting or platform but maintaining URL structures, it should be seamless, but if you’re rebranding and changing the domain name, expect some period of turbulence.

It’s also important to note that poor strategy can also come from the business.

Sometimes stakeholders create plans on how the website, brand, and wider strategy will move forward, but the business strategy (and expectations) don’t marry up with the proposed timelines or what is technically feasible.

Poor Planning & Scoping

Devising a detailed scope and project plan early on can help avoid delays along the way by setting expectations of how long SEO processes and tasks take.

This also allows you to factor in what is and isn’t within the scope of the project, so you can schedule and allocate resources adequately.

By setting out a plan, you can also identify potential obstacles, such as public holidays or peak sales periods.

For example, as an online retailer, you wouldn’t launch a website in the days running up to Thanksgiving, as major bugs could jeopardize your Black Friday/Cyber Week/Christmas period.

Late Involvement

SEO migrations don’t happen overnight.

However, SEO support is oftentimes sought too late down the roadmap, with many critical decisions made beforehand that will impact organic search performance.

Sometimes the late involvement can be a saving grace, as long as there is room in the timeline for changes to be made – but that is seldom the case, and you can only watch and prepare for the post-mortem.

This can also mean that there is a lack of sufficient testing (from an SEO perspective), and not all performance-affecting issues may be resolved in time if the migration deadline is rigid.

Slow Development Response Times

This is, more often than not, an issue with the business itself and not something SEO professionals can control.

I’ve been in situations before where immediately after the migration, the development resource has been fully rededicated to another part of the business, leaving no time for urgent or ad hoc bug fixes.

More often than not, this isn’t the developer’s fault but more a symptom of poor planning from decision-making stakeholders.

I’ve seen websites go live before with a sitewide noindex (as the wrong bucket had been deployed), something we flagged almost immediately – only for it to take four days for the resource to be allocated to remove it.

Uncontrollable Variables

Every now and again, despite the best planning and resource allocation, you’ll get sideswiped by something unforeseen and completely unavoidable – such as a Google update or the CDN/DNS suffering outage.

A good example of this came in August 2020, when Caffeine broke. During this time, new URLs weren’t being indexed.

Ineffective Communications With Stakeholders

When speaking to companies about their migrations, and migration strategies, one of the key issues is around the communication and expectation level of indirect stakeholders, typically VPs and C-Suite.

It’s important that all risks are outlined both in the technical terms of the delivery but also summarized and digestible for the non-technical C-suite.

In these summary documents, it’s important to not only outline the risks but also what we expect to see – as the experienced consultants we are – and at which points we need to start triaging/panicking.

This greatly reduces the pressure from kneejerk reactions and scrambling due to C-level involvement and not understanding the whole picture.

More resources:


Featured Image: 123graphic/Shutterstock



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State Of Marketing Data Standards In The AI Era [Webinar]

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State Of Marketing Data Standards In The AI Era [Webinar]

Claravine and Advertiser Perceptions surveyed 140 marketers and agencies to better understand the impact of data standards on marketing data, and they’re ready to present their findings.

Want to learn how you can mitigate privacy risks and boost ROI through data standards?

Watch this on-demand webinar and learn how companies are addressing new privacy laws, taking advantage of AI, and organizing their data to better capture the campaign data they need, as well as how you can implement these findings in your campaigns.

In this webinar, you will:

  • Gain a better understanding of how your marketing data management compares to enterprise advertisers.
  • Get an overview of the current state of data standards and analytics, and how marketers are managing risk while improving the ROI of their programs.
  • Walk away with tactics and best practices that you can use to improve your marketing data now.

Chris Comstock, Chief Growth Officer at Claravine, will show you the marketing data trends of top advertisers and the potential pitfalls that come with poor data standards.

Learn the key ways to level up your data strategy to pinpoint campaign success.

View the slides below or check out the full webinar for all the details.

Join Us For Our Next Webinar!

SaaS Marketing: Expert Paid Media Tips Backed By $150M In Ad Spend

Join us and learn a unique methodology for growth that has driven massive revenue at a lower cost for hundreds of SaaS brands. We’ll dive into case studies backed by real data from over $150 million in SaaS ad spend per year.

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GPT Store Set To Launch In 2024 After ‘Unexpected’ Delays

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GPT Store Set To Launch In 2024 After 'Unexpected' Delays

OpenAI shares its plans for the GPT Store, enhancements to GPT Builder tools, privacy improvements, and updates coming to ChatGPT.

  • OpenAI has scheduled the launch of the GPT Store for early next year, aligning with its ongoing commitment to developing advanced AI technologies.
  • The GPT Builder tools have received substantial updates, including a more intuitive configuration interface and improved file handling capabilities.
  • Anticipation builds for upcoming updates to ChatGPT, highlighting OpenAI’s responsiveness to community feedback and dedication to AI innovation.

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96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here’s How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023]

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96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023]

It’s no secret that the web is growing by millions, if not billions of pages per day.

Our Content Explorer tool discovers 10 million new pages every 24 hours while being very picky about the pages that qualify for inclusion. The “main” Ahrefs web crawler crawls that number of pages every two minutes. 

But how much of this content gets organic traffic from Google?

To find out, we took the entire database from our Content Explorer tool (around 14 billion pages) and studied how many pages get traffic from organic search and why.

How many web pages get organic search traffic?

96.55% of all pages in our index get zero traffic from Google, and 1.94% get between one and ten monthly visits.

Distribution of pages by traffic from Content Explorer

Before we move on to discussing why the vast majority of pages never get any search traffic from Google (and how to avoid being one of them), it’s important to address two discrepancies with the studied data:

  1. ~14 billion pages may seem like a huge number, but it’s not the most accurate representation of the entire web. Even compared to the size of Site Explorer’s index of 340.8 billion pages, our sample size for this study is quite small and somewhat biased towards the “quality side of the web.”
  2. Our search traffic numbers are estimates. Even though our database of ~651 million keywords in Site Explorer (where our estimates come from) is arguably the largest database of its kind, it doesn’t contain every possible thing people search for in Google. There’s a chance that some of these pages get search traffic from super long-tail keywords that are not popular enough to make it into our database.

That said, these two “inaccuracies” don’t change much in the grand scheme of things: the vast majority of published pages never rank in Google and never get any search traffic. 

But why is this, and how can you be a part of the minority that gets organic search traffic from Google?

Well, there are hundreds of SEO issues that may prevent your pages from ranking well in Google. But if we focus only on the most common scenarios, assuming the page is indexed, there are only three of them.

Reason 1: The topic has no search demand

If nobody is searching for your topic, you won’t get any search traffic—even if you rank #1.

For example, I recently Googled “pull sitemap into google sheets” and clicked the top-ranking page (which solved my problem in seconds, by the way). But if you plug that URL into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, you’ll see that it gets zero estimated organic search traffic:

The top-ranking page for this topic gets no traffic because there's no search demandThe top-ranking page for this topic gets no traffic because there's no search demand

This is because hardly anyone else is searching for this, as data from Keywords Explorer confirms:

Keyword data from Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer confirms that this topic has no search demandKeyword data from Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer confirms that this topic has no search demand

This is why it’s so important to do keyword research. You can’t just assume that people are searching for whatever you want to talk about. You need to check the data.

Our Traffic Potential (TP) metric in Keywords Explorer can help with this. It estimates how much organic search traffic the current top-ranking page for a keyword gets from all the queries it ranks for. This is a good indicator of the total search demand for a topic.

You’ll see this metric for every keyword in Keywords Explorer, and you can even filter for keywords that meet your minimum criteria (e.g., 500+ monthly traffic potential): 

Filtering for keywords with Traffic Potential (TP) in Ahrefs' Keywords ExplorerFiltering for keywords with Traffic Potential (TP) in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

Reason 2: The page has no backlinks

Backlinks are one of Google’s top three ranking factors, so it probably comes as no surprise that there’s a clear correlation between the number of websites linking to a page and its traffic.

Pages with more referring domains get more trafficPages with more referring domains get more traffic
Pages with more referring domains get more traffic

Same goes for the correlation between a page’s traffic and keyword rankings:

Pages with more referring domains rank for more keywordsPages with more referring domains rank for more keywords
Pages with more referring domains rank for more keywords

Does any of this data prove that backlinks help you rank higher in Google?

No, because correlation does not imply causation. However, most SEO professionals will tell you that it’s almost impossible to rank on the first page for competitive keywords without backlinks—an observation that aligns with the data above.

The key word there is “competitive.” Plenty of pages get organic traffic while having no backlinks…

Pages with more referring domains get more trafficPages with more referring domains get more traffic
How much traffic pages with no backlinks get

… but from what I can tell, almost all of them are about low-competition topics.

For example, this lyrics page for a Neil Young song gets an estimated 162 monthly visits with no backlinks: 

Example of a page with traffic but no backlinks, via Ahrefs' Content ExplorerExample of a page with traffic but no backlinks, via Ahrefs' Content Explorer

But if we check the keywords it ranks for, they almost all have Keyword Difficulty (KD) scores in the single figures:

Some of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks forSome of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks for

It’s the same story for this page selling upholstered headboards:

Some of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks forSome of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks for

You might have noticed two other things about these pages:

  • Neither of them get that much traffic. This is pretty typical. Our index contains ~20 million pages with no referring domains, yet only 2,997 of them get more than 1K search visits per month. That’s roughly 1 in every 6,671 pages with no backlinks.
  • Both of the sites they’re on have high Domain Rating (DR) scores. This metric shows the relative strength of a website’s backlink profile. Stronger sites like these have more PageRank that they can pass to pages with internal links to help them rank. 

Bottom line? If you want your pages to get search traffic, you really only have two options:

  1. Target uncompetitive topics that you can rank for with few or no backlinks.
  2. Target competitive topics and build backlinks to rank.

If you want to find uncompetitive topics, try this:

  1. Enter a topic into Keywords Explorer
  2. Go to the Matching terms report
  3. Set the Keyword Difficulty (KD) filter to max. 20
  4. Set the Lowest DR filter to your site’s DR (this will show you keywords with at least one of the same or lower DR ranking in the top 5)
Filtering for low-competition keywords in Ahrefs' Keywords ExplorerFiltering for low-competition keywords in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

(Remember to keep an eye on the TP column to make sure they have traffic potential.)

To rank for more competitive topics, you’ll need to earn or build high-quality backlinks to your page. If you’re not sure how to do that, start with the guides below. Keep in mind that it’ll be practically impossible to get links unless your content adds something to the conversation. 

Reason 3. The page doesn’t match search intent

Google wants to give users the most relevant results for a query. That’s why the top organic results for “best yoga mat” are blog posts with recommendations, not product pages. 

It's obviously what searchers want when they search for "best yoga mats"It's obviously what searchers want when they search for "best yoga mats"

Basically, Google knows that searchers are in research mode, not buying mode.

It’s also why this page selling yoga mats doesn’t show up, despite it having backlinks from more than six times more websites than any of the top-ranking pages:

Page selling yoga mats that has lots of backlinksPage selling yoga mats that has lots of backlinks
Number of linking websites to the top-ranking pages for "best yoga mats"Number of linking websites to the top-ranking pages for "best yoga mats"

Luckily, the page ranks for thousands of other more relevant keywords and gets tens of thousands of monthly organic visits. So it’s not such a big deal that it doesn’t rank for “best yoga mats.”

Number of keyword rankings for the page selling yoga matsNumber of keyword rankings for the page selling yoga mats

However, if you have pages with lots of backlinks but no organic traffic—and they already target a keyword with traffic potential—another quick SEO win is to re-optimize them for search intent.

We did this in 2018 with our free backlink checker.

It was originally nothing but a boring landing page explaining the benefits of our product and offering a 7-day trial: 

Original landing page for our free backlink checkerOriginal landing page for our free backlink checker

After analyzing search intent, we soon realized the issue:

People weren’t looking for a landing page, but rather a free tool they could use right away. 

So, in September 2018, we created a free tool and published it under the same URL. It ranked #1 pretty much overnight, and has remained there ever since. 

Our rankings over time for the keyword "backlink checker." You can see when we changed the pageOur rankings over time for the keyword "backlink checker." You can see when we changed the page

Organic traffic went through the roof, too. From ~14K monthly organic visits pre-optimization to almost ~200K today. 

Estimated search traffic over time to our free backlink checkerEstimated search traffic over time to our free backlink checker

TLDR

96.55% of pages get no organic traffic. 

Keep your pages in the other 3.45% by building backlinks, choosing topics with organic traffic potential, and matching search intent.

Ping me on Twitter if you have any questions. 🙂



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