Seo Platform Migration
Introduction
When you move a website from one platform to another, one of the biggest risk factors is your search engine rankings.
The most common mistake made by retailers and web developers when during a platform migration is making the assumption that somehow your search engine rankings will look after themselves. This is not the case. If you do not take the time to give Google the best possible chance of understanding what is going on, it is likely that you will lose important rankings for months or even forever.
The is article describes a methodology for making the transition that substantially reduces the risk.
SEO assets
Before you can take steps to protect your SEO assets, you first need to know what they are.
Content
The single most important asset is the content of your website, this includes all of the pages, images it comprises. At the end of the day, all Google wants to do is direct browsers to the best possible content in response to their queries. If you have lot's of highly ranked pages, the content on these pages will be the biggest factor.
There are two types of content on your website - unstructured and structured.
Unstructured content
The content on the body of web pages is "unstructured", which means that search engines have to figure out what it is and what it's for. If you don't replicate what is already on the site, then you are asking for trouble.
Structured content
While it is easy to see the unstructured site content - it is what your visitors read - viewing the structured data on your web pages is harder. Structured data is information embedded on the page that is designed to be read by search engines and other systems and not by humans.
It makes it easier for search engines understand the content of the page by presenting it in a structured way. So, when Google crawls your site it can quickly determine, says the name and price of a product, rather than having to figure it out for itself.
Although not all structured content is believed to be used as a factor when determining the rank of a page, you are more likely to appear in relevant searches.
There are two types of structured content that you need to be concerned about - your page meta data and structured data.
Page Meta Tags
The most important Meta Data fields are listed in Table 1.
| Field | Description | Length (Chars) |
|---|---|---|
| Page Title | The title of the page | 65 |
| Meta Description | Brief description of the page content | 165 - 320 |
| Meta Keywords | List of keywords (not used by Google) | N/A |
| rel="canonical" | The URL of the original version of this page that is usually added by the CRM system | N/A |
The best approach here is to replicate what is on the existing site. If content is missing then this is a good opportunity to bring it up to date,
Structured data
While it is simple to update your page meta data (it's the stuff that everyone knows about), you will need someone technical to ensure that the structured data you have on your current site is replication in the new site. If there is none there, then it should be added to the pages.
Internal Links
The links that appear on your web site. Search engines use navigation and other links to explore your site and understand how it is glued together.
Please note that it the link text is as important as the links themselves. Also, avoid using dynanic links. Although Google says that it can detect most links embedded in JavaScript tried to avoid this unless you have previous experience.
External Links
A very important factor that contributes to the success of your site is links from eternal websites. Search engines use the quantity and quality of these links to establish the reputation of your business. The more high quality external links you have, the more highly your pages are to be ranked.
You can find a list of externally linked pages in Google Search Console. However, it is a good idea to augment this withe links that you find in a third party system, such as Moz.
Migration Process
The goal of the migration process is to migrate the content of your online store into a new platform without making Google think your website has disappeared. The reason why it might is that different systems use different URLs for the same pages. So a page created that has the URL "/acatalog/Widgets.html" in Sellerdeck, might be translated into "/collections/widgets" in Shopify.
If you don't tell Google that the page is moving, then it has to figure it out for itself, which takes time. To give you an idea how long, one of my clients changed the name of one of their higher ranking pages and it dropped out of the rankings for almost 2 months. And that was without changing anything else!
To minimise the disruption, you can instruct your ecommerce system, or web server, to redirect people using the old page names to the new ones. That enables you to tell Google that the page has permanently move to a new place. So long as you don't fundamentally change the content of the page, this will reduce the disruption to your rankings.
As the above implies, creating the same number of unique pages on the each site, makes life a lot easier.
Step 1 - Create a list of important URLs
The assumption that people tend to make is that if you create an equivalent page on your new website foe each page on the old one and then create redirects for each one, then the job is done.
While this will cover most bases, you have to be careful. If your online store has been online for a few years then there may already be redirects on the site for pages that have been removed over the years. It is therefore vital to generate a list of URLS from the following sources, including:
- Your current ecommerce system or HTACCESS file.
- Google Search Console
- Google Analytics
- Moz Link Explorer
The reason that this is necessary is that there will be links to your website on third party websites. These links could be playing an important role in your search engine rankings, so you don't want to break them.
I recommend that you create a comprehensive list, including any information that might give you an indication of their importance, such as their search engine ranking, inbound traffic and the Domain Authority .
Step 2 - Create a URL map
It might sound technical, but it isn't. All a URL map only has to contain two columns.
| Column | Description |
|---|---|
| Redirect from | The URL of the original page, such as "/acatalog/Widgets.html". |
| Redirect to | The URL of the new page, such as "/collections/widgets". |
Creating it can be manual and laborious, so having the ability to import and export data into your ecommerce platform makes it much easier to create. For example, when migrating collections, products and pages into Shopify, I import the original page location at the same time. That means whatever changes you make to the site subsequently, such as adding and removing pages, it is very easy to generate a URL map based on what you have on the site.
You can then merge this with your list of important URLs to identify pages that are missing redirects. Using SQL Service or a spreadsheet to achieve this can reduce the time it takes and substantially improve quality.
Step 3 - Test, test, test
As with any process of this nature, it is all too easy introduce errors. It is easy enough to find them, however. Once you have setup you redirects, use an application like Screaming Frog to test them.
Step 4 - Measure and monitor
Once you new website has gone live it will take a few days before you see the changes take effect.
To make sure things are okay, I spend half an hour each morning, looking up the site using the most popular search terms. I click the links to make sure that the redirects are working. No matte how much care you take, it is easy to make mistakes.
I review the performance of the site in Google Analytics, Google Search Console and track the performance of the most important keywords in Moz.