Time truly is a valuable resource.
It drives the difference between tranquility and disruption.
More often than I’d like to see, website migrations are deprived of said resource. Time gives you funding, gives you access to stakeholders, and the opportunities to have a successful migration. Resources beget resources.
Often, I’m looped into a website migration where there are more constraints than had to be because of time.
Based on the conversations I’ve had with brands, SEO during a migration is underestimated.
When brands talk about preserving SEO, they often think, “All we need is redirects”.
Which couldn’t be farther from the truth.
SEO during a migration is filled with launch essentiations that range from coordinating with other team members, building out a meta data strategy and setting up benchmarks to track against success.
I’d like to walk you through an ideal timeline of launch essential SEO tasks for a migration.
Let’s look at these tasks in a series of stages.
- Pre-Migration
- Discovery
- The Build
- Pre-launch
- Launch Day
- Post-Launch
Please bear in mind that the duration of these stages are totally relative based on unique projects. Your migration project may differ.
In these stages, I hope to share what you can accomplish alongside the larger migration team and what you risk to lose by keeping SEO out (believe there is a ton to lose in an unsuccessful migration).
Let’s get started.
Migration Types
Before we deep dive into an ideal timeline and the stages, it’s necessary to call out that no 2 migrations are ever alike.
That is, migrations can vary based on the project goals. Below are some common migrations you may encounter.
Redesign: Your site may have undergone a rebrand or you are consolidating content across your site that may require an update to your sites’ code base. In any case, there may be structural changes in addition to stylistic changes applied to your site that may impact whether web pages are going to retire or continue to live on, all of which have an impact on SEO.
CMS or Framework Update: It’s possible that your entire site is running on an antiquated content management system (CMS) that may be more of a hindrance to web performance. As such, you’re looking to migrate away from a legacy CMS to a better performing platform or Framework that is faster, mobile friendly, and runs on more modern technology.
Moving to a New Server: You might have been running into server issues that cannot handle the amount of traffic that your site is experiencing and as such you’re updating your server technology to suit your traffic needs.
Domain Movement: Based on the needs of your brand, you may need to either expand the number of domains into different ccTLDs (international domains), completely shift domain locations, or consolidate web properties either under a subdomain or subfolder.
For our purposes, we can say this timeline is specific to e-commerce CMS replatforming / migrations.
The Ideal Timeline
Although it can / will vary, I have found an ideal timeline to loop in SEO during an e-commerce replatform is ~12 months.
Getting looped in 12 months prior to launch date gives you enough runway to ensure that you get as much context around the project, with room to communicate your requirements and implement optimizations.
Granted, some projects might be shorter or longer but I’ve found 12 months to be a sweet spot.
Pre-Migration
You have to be scoped into a migration project and the only way to do that is by being looped into the RFP or pitching process.
This is where organizations are trying to court migration work. Keep in mind, this is before or around the time negotiations take place.
Given the sheer size of the budget, several pieces are flying at the same time. Budgets are being carved out across all disciplines, including,
- Design
- UX
- Development
- Business Analysts
- Project & Account managers
- And marketing teams…
SEO at this Stage
If you are involved at this stage, congratulations!
Being involved at this stage ensures you understand the site from the earliest possible moment. This increases the odds of you being looped into a Statement of Work – or a document that outlines project-specific activities, deliverables, timelines, resources, funding, etc.
You get to voice concerns, considerations, or interest in SEO involvement.
You can make the case for the necessary SEO budget to see the migration project through.
A migration project is built off of budgets. Everything costs money. You have to pay for the time of each of your migration partners, including the cost of the tools needed to see the project through.
This is the perfect time to ask yourself: “how many hours should I estimate for site migration SEO activities.”
As an SEO, you can state you will need X00 hours to see the migration through, but there’s an issue:
How do you determine those estimates?
As with all things, it depends…You’d have to know as much as you can about the project and what you feel, based on your skillset, it would take to complete SEO launch readiness.
Once a Statement of Work is complete and you’re looped in, you have funding to participate in crucial conversations.
I’ve been looped into migrations where an SOW was written by a non-SEOer – salespersons, often – with boiler plate language.
As an SEOer, you want to dictate your own level of effort based on what you know about the project and best practices. You wouldn’t want to provide hours estimates for a developer, right? Why would you want to let a non-SEOer estimate SEO effort?
This is the most ideal time for an SEO to be looped into a migration. It gives us the runway to ensure we get the site as optimized as possible for launch.
If SEO is Not Involved Yet
If you or SEO resources aren’t looped in just yet, thankfully, it’s not the end of the world. Because the project is in its early stages, you will still have the opportunity to voice the needs of SEO early.
Begin to have the conversations with all necessary parties. The topic should be around what role will SEO play in the project?
This includes having conversations with your stakeholders, the client’s stakeholders, development team members – anyone and everyone that will listen.
1st Stage: Discovery
Lo and behold.
You’ve made it past negotiations and got your SEO budget. What do you do at this point?
Enter the Discovery phase.
The discovery phase of a migration (or major development) project is when all teams and disciplines meet.
The goal of the discovery phase is to build a timeline of the project and to better understand the brand’s history, goals, and any additional context that will support the migration.
At this stage, you become familiar with the parties developing the site and drive SEO solutions, including developers, designers, writers, project managers, among varying client teams.
What’s more, the project management team will begin following a sprint cadence from here until launch. This is significant because knowing how the sprints are structured will give you an idea of what sort of runway exists between now and launch.
SEO At This Stage
A major component to this phase is gathering SEO requirements that are built from these conversations.
Without SEO requirements, the site may be built without SEO best practices baked in. SEO requirements may include but is limited to,
- Redirect Strategies / Logic
- Meta Data Optimization
- URL Optimization
- Canonical Tag Behavior
- Robots.txt Optimization
- XML Sitemap Optimization
- Internal Linking Audit
- Benchmark Reporting
The above are the requirements I recommend a site tackle through a migration. It doesn’t mean a migration project can’t include other robust requirements, rather, when I’ve seen a site decline in performance, the reasons are typically tied to the above.
Based on the goals of the project, SEO requirements can be more robust. For example, you may be migrating a recipes website and Schema is a huge part of the effort. You’d want to ensure that Schema is working without issue.
Other robust requirements may include optimizations around the below,
- PageSpeed
- Core Web Vitals
- Advanced Schema Markup
- SEO-filtered URLs
You can begin to document the requirements. With the support from the project management team, you and the teams can assess whether the current scope of work can accommodate SEO requirements or if a change request, or update to the current scope, needs to take place to secure additional funding.
If SEO is Not Involved Yet
If you are not involved at this point, work with your teams to understand the project and the level of SEO needed. To help get you looped in, talk to project managers, developers, brand managers. Understand where organic search can be impacted and, if necessary, escalate.
Once you have a great understanding of what’s to take place, don’t shy from uncomfortable (but warranted) questions, like,
- What’s in the SEO project plan thus far?
- What are SEO launch requirements?
- What’s the redirect strategy? How will you all build a redirect map?
- Do you all have a site migration checklist?
Your questions aren’t meant to be “gotchas!”. They’re meant to help other teams start to think through the need for SEO and the need to loop your team in.
If you’ve pushed, escalated, and still no one sees the need in SEO yet, don’t be too hard on yourself. Tomorrow is another day and another stage will be around the corner.
2nd Stage: The Build is Under Way
At this point, discoveries are behind you. You have a great understanding of the project and the trajectory the teams want to take, including where SEO will fit in the larger picture.
With that, several things are happening at once.
Design and content planning are underway and may continue to the end of this stage and beyond.
The initial skeleton of the site is being created within a development or sandbox environment.
All teams, design, technical, content, etc., are solutioning around requirements set by the client in discovery and tracked against regularly through sprint cycles.
Additionally all team members should be meeting regularly to discuss progress and report issues / blockers through periodic scrum meetings.
You as an SEOer are also keeping busy. Let’s see how…
SEO At This Stage
You should be looped into all relevant conversations that impact SEO; including those around development and content.
You will be providing general SEO guidance, making sure that the requirements from other teams don’t inhibit organic search visibility.
As there will be varying team workflows, there will be a lot of meetings; it can be overwhelming but I encourage you to build relationships at this point.
They’re necessary.
SEO needs a face and a voice – YOU.
Long term, with the relationships you’ve built, you may begin to build advocates that can keep an ear out for anything that may impact SEO. This then lets you sleep easier.
What’s more, as the site is being built out, you can QA as the build advances. This gives you an opportunity to voice concerns and create SEO dev tickets, where necessary.
But again, begin to foster those relationships.
So what SEO launch essentials should be happening at this stage? Let’s take a look.
Gather Site Pages / Page Types
This is particularly important for migrations projects where CMS’s are changing. With it, the possibility of URLs shifting is very high.
As such, you want to gather your site pages from the soon-to-be legacy / current site. You can do this by crawling your current site. Screaming Frog is my preferred crawler.
Or, you can lean on data aggregators such as Google Search Console, Google Analytics, SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc.
The goal is to have a list of performing URLs prior to a migration.
What’s more, I encourage you to categorize this list as it’ll play a pivotal role in building your redirect strategy.
Finalize Site Architecture
Based on the insights and conversations from discovery, the larger team will be working towards finalizing the site architecture.
That includes understanding what aspects of the old site will live on, be overhauled, or retired.
You, as an SEO, will need to review the architecture and ensure that the revised approach will not inhibit organic search.
You can do this by looking at the legacy architecture performance in the organic space. What has performed well? What should be improved or retained? I advise you to look at the data aggregators mentioned above.
Build Redirect Strategy
You have a list of performing pages and a near-finalized site architecture. Now you can begin to devise how to best build a redirect strategy based on the various pieces of the project, including the technology driving the new website.
Keep in mind that a redirect strategy is different from a redirect map. The former leverages resources at a higher level. The latter is the output of the former.
Review Canonical Tags
Because you have your SEO requirements for canonicals and a bare-boned development site, you can begin to review the canonical tag behavior of the new site.
Canonical tags can be pivotal in SEO and as such, if you can catch a canonical issue early, the better. You have enough time and budget to support a fix.
I’ve typically noted that various CMS’s need supplemental dev work on canonical tags and it’s why I suggest working on it early in a migration.
Optimize URL Structure
Depending on the CMS you’re migrating to, creating a URL structure may be pretty straightforward or pretty complicated based on the new site architecture / tech limitations.
At this stage, begin to optimize your URL structure. You’ll more than likely find that CMS capabilities as well as data will impact URL configuration.
Build Meta Data Strategy
In a migration project, meta data strategy takes on a new meaning.
You’ll want to begin to think through how you want your meta data to be optimized.
Should meta data be programmatically built?
Should meta data be written from scratch?
Should you reuse your existing meta data?
Gather Benchmark Metrics
How do you ensure the upcoming launch of your new site was a success?
You have to identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter most to your business. This is subjective but in most cases, KPIs include traffic and conversion metrics, including but not limited to,
- Sessions
- Time on site
- Revenue
- Conversion Rate
Monitoring these metrics will help you understand whether the site is in good standing after launch.
If traffic and conversions are in decline the benchmark metrics will be able to help assess where the declines are occurring.
Each brand has their own approach to benchmark reporting but I typically recommend using Google Data Studio to consolidate data. If your brand doesn’t use Google data aggregation, rather an analytics platform such as Adobe Analytics, then you may have to report in a different format, e.g. PowerPoint.
Build Robots.txt
I suggest building the robots in this phase as, depending on the CMS you’re migrating to, building a robots.txt may require dev support.
I’ve experienced reservations on building a robots.txt before launch as it will be an indicator to search engines to visit the site.
Not true.
You can still build a robots file and have the site live behind a login.
What’s more, with a website migration tool like Screaming Frog you can even test out a robots.txt without pushing it to a dev environment.
This task may go into the next phase but understanding the limitations in building the file will give you enough time to course correct.
Build XML Sitemap
Similar to the robots.txt file, I suggest understanding the sitemap configuration and its output during this phase.
Depending on the CMS you’re migrating to, it may be a dev-heavy effort.
I’ve often seen sitemaps behave awkwardly based on data that is fed to a dev site and you’ll want to secure an optimized format going into launch.
I recommend starting to optimize the sitemap in this phase because if dev support is required, you are more likely to get the necessary resources than when you’re at the end of the project.,
What’s more, you can crawl and test these files in Screaming Frog.
Plan Google Search Console & Google Analytics Verification
There are several means to verify both Google Search Console and Google Analytics but bringing it up at this phase will ensure you have a path forward.
These are all thoughts you should begin to dwell on during the SEO requirements phase and build towards during this stage.
Understanding the CMS’s capabilities will help you in determining what will be possible and what will be difficult.
If SEO is Not Involved Yet
There’s a lot taking place at this stage, no?
You may be beginning to see why it’s significant to loop in SEO earlier.
In any case, let’s say SEO is not involved – what do you do?
I’ve always felt that this stage is pivotal for SEO and it is imperative to get looped in.
The building of the site is underway.
Blockers and solutions are being identified.
Budgets are not only carved out but already being tapped into.
If SEO is not involved at this stage, there are red flags that are beginning to pop up.
If you find the new site needs SEO resources, I advise you to escalate to your stakeholders and loop them into the risk ahead.
If you’re pushing hard and no one wants SEO looped in, I urge you to take the following steps.
DOCUMENT YOUR PUSH TO GET SEO INVOLVED
That is, ensure that you’re leaving a paper trail on your recommendation to loop in SEO.
It sounds a bit excessive but based on my experience, when I’m told SEO isn’t necessary for a migration project at this stage or later, the risk to organic performance begins to compound.
The timeline is much shorter and the likelihood of SEO launch essentials slipping increases.
As such, keeping documentation on your urgency to get SEO involved is a safeguard if and when things hit the fan and people begin to panic.
3rd Stage: Pre-launch Phase
We’re almost at the finish line…
Enter the Pre-launch phase!
This is the phase where several things are either wrapping up or on the cusp of winding down.
Designs and content should already be done or close to being completed.
The number of sprints or development cycles is severely limited, and with it, development work is coming to an end.
With the launch date looming, UAT, or user acceptance testing, will be scheduled and teams will begin to rigorously test the new site for any bugs or defects. This includes website functionality, including,
- Cart / Checkout
- Content
- Navigation
- Image Styling
- Buttons
- Pricing
- Data feeds
- Banners
The list goes on and on.
With the exception of hotfixes, or quick dev tasks, most development projects will be closed off. As site launch approaches, code freeze will be put in place where nothing can jeopardize the site’s code base.
Anything not launch-essential is revisited as a post-launch project.
The launch continues as normal.
What. About. SEO?
SEO At This Stage
Like various other groups, you see the finish line.
If you’ve already been in the loop with this project, you’re finalizing various tasks as well.
In this stage, you should have completed various other SEO launch tasks but the main ones you’ll probably still be focusing on are around redirects.
Testing, Updating and Finalizing Your Redirect Map
Ideally, your redirect strategy would have been finalized ages ago.
Realistically, your redirect map is still a work in progress.
That’s ok.
Remember other disciplines are still working towards finalizing the site – design, architecture, development – whose deliverables and recommendations can affect your map.
An e-commerce site has data feeds that generate product data / pages. If the feeds aren’t finalized or glitchy, it can affect the target pages you’ll need in your redirect map.
It’s not uncommon to see redirect maps finalized a week or so before launch.
It’s not ideal but it is the trend I have noted. You should be communicating with the larger teams on the resources you need to finalize redirects.
Staging / Development Site Audit
The site is being finalized and with it, it’ll be closer to its true state than ever before.
That includes pages that will need to be pushed live and its contents.
Because you have a more finalized site, you can now engage in a crawl of the development / staging site.
Side note: there are different environments a site will be found in – staging, development, production. These are all used in varying ways. I suggest you consult with your greater team to understand which site is the most up to date.
You should crawl your site with a tool like Screaming Frog to assess where gaps exist or optimizations are still needed. For example, in your crawl, I suggest reviewing,
- Meta Data
- H1 Tags
- Canonicals
- Internal Linking
- HTTP Status Codes
What you’ll notice is that I don’t recommend checking for PageSpeed or Core Web Vitals data. It’s not because they’re unimportant; rather, because the ongoing build of a new site will make those metrics inaccurate based on the resources that are moved around. If you want to add it in as a requirement at the onset, you can keep it on everyones’ radar but I typically have seen these efforts as a post-launch project.
If SEO is Not Involved Yet
If SEO is not involved at this point, the site’s organic performance is at great risk.
There’s no sugar coating it.
Nor is it uncommon for brands to wait until the very, very last minute to loop in SEO.
If you find yourself with a last minute SEO migration project in your hands – which is not out of the realm of possibility – there are a few things I would suggest.
Be honest
You’ve shared concerns around SEO not being looped in up until this point.
Be honest and state what can and cannot be accomplished by the launch date.
It’s unfair to expect an SEO to optimize a major project like a migration with limited resources during an abbreviated timeline.
I wouldn’t lose any sleep, after all, you’ve been pushing hard for SEO to get looped in.
Lean on your documentation
I mentioned earlier that you should be documenting how hard you pushed for SEO to be involved.
That is because at this stage if you haven’t been looped, things may get messy and people will start wondering where SEO was.
You want to show all team members, stakeholders and otherwise, you pushed but because of forces beyond your control, you weren’t able to get into the project.
Focus on the redirects
That is, keep asking for SEO to be looped in but focus on what is absolutely critical to minimize the fallout from a migration that hasn’t been optimized for search engines.
I’ve typically seen redirects be the top SEO priority for a brand that has looped in SEO at the last minute.
Although most SEOers would agree, content (page titles, meta descriptions, h1s, copy, etc.) is tremendously important, a majority of this workload can be managed post-launch.
Redirect cleanup can be messy and solutioning can be more difficult post-launch.
Without redirects, search engine authority can dissipate to the abyss.
4th Stage: Launch Day & Support
The day is finally here…
Launch Day.
The time of day will vary depending on what the team has decided. It can range from early morning, afternoon, late at night.
More than likely it will take place during hours that will cause little to no disruption to current online users’ experience.
The teams will hop on a launch call and it will resemble something similar to a “War Room” style meeting. That is, team members across varying disciplines will be on the call throughout the process.
This includes team members from development, web ops, stakeholders, project managers, SEO, analytics, etc.
It’s a pretty big deal.
It’s the culmination of everyone’s work.
With that, the development and web operations teams will likely begin to configure the sites so the development / staging environment will be replicated to a live (production) environment.
Once that happens, it’s go time for SEO…
SEO At This Stage
You should be on the launch call like anyone else.
Everything you’ve done can and will have detrimental effects to the overall success of the site.
What should you focus on?
Like any other group, you have your own set of items to QA. Additionally, because everyone is on the call, depending on what you find, you’ll get everyone’s attention. Let’s dig in to where you need to QA as an SEOer,
Redirects
You’ve spent a grand amount of time building out a redirect map.
Now is your time to ensure the map is working as intended.
Leverage your crawlers to ping the legacy URLs and ensure they are redirecting to their new locations.
Report on the redirect map accuracy and any gaps that still need to be closed.
Meta data
Based on your meta data strategy, you should begin to see critical SEO elements populate.
A crawl of the site will programmatically identify the state of those elements and where gaps may exist.
Verifying site
Don’t forget, you still need to verify access to the new site through Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, and Google Analytics.
Now that the site is live, you should move forward with the verification process.
Submitting sitemaps
With access to GSC and BWT, you can also submit your newly created sitemaps.
I advise you to keep your legacy sitemaps in place.
Although they’re inaccurate, they do point to legacy URLs that are redirecting to a new location. You’re now encouraging search engines to follow the URL redirects.
If SEO is Not Involved Yet
We already know the inherent risk of keeping SEO out of the loop during a migration project.
At this point there’s very little you can do until you get the proper resources / funding to support SEO involvement, that’s of course if SEO is needed.
As a consultant, you tried but business requirements / limitations tied your hands.
As advised earlier, you should be keeping documentation of your urgency to include SEO. If performance begins to decline and stakeholders are looking to understand why SEO wasn’t included, you can rest easy knowing that you documented how hard you pushed.
Post-launch
The dust is beginning to settle on a gargantuan effort. The migration is almost fully behind you.
But with any migration, there’s always going to be turbulence.
This is why I recommended you create a benchmark report housing all your KPIs.
You can ultimately reference the benchmark report to understand how performance is trending post-launch and where there are supplemental opportunities to optimize the site – that is, do redirects need to be updated / added, are optimizations missing, how are conversions, etc.
What’s more, the tasks and projects you were not able to get to during the migration, can now be queued up and roadmapped on the new site.
The beautiful part about this is that you’re no longer leaning on a migration budget to move forward; rather you are now in a support phase where the development cycle might differ from that of a migration.
Summary
Well I’m sure that was an immense amount to take in.
But tying website migrations and SEO is no easy feat. This is why it’s so critical to involve SEO at the onset of a migration project.
Oftentimes we don’t know what we don’t know and SEO is an area where several teams often underestimate.
Based on a timeline I’ve laid out above, I hope it serves as a guide on where you need organic search support.
If you find your team beginning website migration conversations, please do not hesitate to reach out or reference the documentation above.
Happy migrating!
