Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: All right, we're back for another 10 speed session. Today we're excited to have Erica Brager from our team manager of organic growth strategy with us.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Hi everyone. Excited to be here.
[00:00:10] Speaker C: Welcome.
[00:00:10] Speaker A: Yes, excited to chat. Today we are going to be chatting about site migrations and kind of all the stuff around that, which obviously companies have been migrating their site to a new CMS or merging due to a company merger or acquisition for a long time. But we do still see it. They pop up for us once or twice every quarter when you have companies needing help and just continues to be something that there's a lot and now even more so in the realm of not just thinking about it as SEO and technical SEO, but also how it impacts aeo. So felt like it'd be a good time to do that. Eric has been instrumental on our team on leading companies through a lot of those and really just the nitty gritty of the site migration. So with that, figured we'd kind of jump into EEAT being a big part of that now.
Something that I think most people talk about it in relation to how you're creating new content, but really it does play a role in the migrations, merging content, consolidating content, a lot of that different stuff as well. So yeah, just wanted to start there as a pretty big part of how that works.
[00:01:32] Speaker C: Yeah, I think also Erica's been really in the weeds with developing some really great eat, as the SEO and AEO nerds would pronounce it, like scorecarding, which actually has some really, really, really great actionable items. So I think you're well suited to speak in depth about this. But why don't we kick it off with like a definition of that acronym?
[00:01:56] Speaker B: Sure. So experience, expertise, authority, nativeness and trust.
So it's how you're showing both users and crawlers that you are an authority in the space on this particular topic, on this particular product and everything that ladders up to that. So how is your content positioning you to be an expert, to be an authority, to be trustworthy.
And there's layers of signals that lead up to that. For example, something I see often on client sites is when I go to the resource center, they don't have authors assigned. It will say like client name staff or client name editorial team, where you're not able to connect an expert back to that particular piece of content.
Client sites that have that expert in house, expert assigned, whether they're still with the company or they're no longer with the company, showing their title, perhaps a byline that Gives a little bit of extra backing as to why they're positioned to publish this piece.
That really sends trust signals to the crawlers. It sends trust signals to the user and that content will perform a lot more strongly.
[00:03:06] Speaker C: What are some other on page signals to bolster or strengthen that? Like you talked about authority like the authorship, but there's some other technical things I think you can be doing to emphasize the expertise of the author or at least their authorship.
[00:03:22] Speaker B: Sure. I've also seen in addition reviewed by.
So it will add additional layers of experts adding quotes to these pieces. It doesn't necessarily have to be from that particular author. It can be from experts inside or outside of the organization showing statistics that are tied to that topic. Whether the statistics were produced by the company itself or an external source. Yeah, all of those little building blocks add up to building trust with the user.
[00:03:55] Speaker C: Yeah, all great signals.
How much weight do you put into like external linking to like other authorship footprints on the web? Cause that's something that comes up a lot too.
[00:04:09] Speaker B: I think like salt, like too much is going to look spammy that you are a little excessive with the external links.
So less is more with external links. Be very selective about who you're linking to, what you're linking to and make sure that. Well, with any link that you add to a piece that you're considering how it's adding additional context for the user.
[00:04:36] Speaker A: I like the salt analogy.
[00:04:37] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:04:38] Speaker A: Externally linked to taste.
[00:04:41] Speaker C: Yeah, there is a taste component to that.
[00:04:43] Speaker A: Cool. And then particularly I guess kind of going back to how within the site migration context, the eat stuff, whether that's preserving that maybe is a good thing to make sure we're covering.
So a company that does have like say we're consolidating. This is literally a client example, consolidating two companies because they merged and one of them having a lot of content with like really strong eeat, like making sure that that is preserved through that migration, I think would be another good thing to make sure we're covering.
[00:05:27] Speaker B: Absolutely.
So when we're merging two websites we need to consider are all of the different products, features, services under these two company umbrellas going to be part of the merger or things being depreciated and then from there you really want to break it out into themes. So what are the courier is a focus what pieces of content have been getting clicks have been getting views have been leading to pipeline and making sure that you sort through all of that to determine okay what is staying what is going.
Because you could have pieces that perform really well, but they're top of funnel, they're informational, and if you look at the analytics and you look a little bit beyond. Okay, what are people doing when they arrive? Well, they don't click beyond here. So it's deciding how do we make sure that it's as tightly defined as possible so that we're only presenting our best foot forward to the user.
[00:06:27] Speaker A: Yeah, I like that you started with like, it wasn't even anything about SEO or the technical. It was literally the business decisions around products and features. And I think that's great and a great reminder for people that it's not just looking at it from the very technical lens or how you, you know, the output of a crawler, but like really starting with that, like, what is, what does this new merged company look like? And let's build from there and figure out how to make all the adjustments. So, yeah, that's great. And I think, you know, the other piece of that is just it's opportunity to fix the stuff that wasn't good and kind of come out of it stronger and, and better, you know, on the other side.
[00:07:23] Speaker C: Yeah, I was going to say, is there anything that you see this is probably going to come up a lot, but like when that happens, just like common mistakes or misses in a, in a consolidation like that or a brand consolidation through a migration, I would say
[00:07:37] Speaker B: you want to pay very close attention to bottom of funnel pieces.
Those are naturally going to be a bit lower volume, but the people that arrive to those pages are much closer to making a buying decision.
So you need to dig into the analytics and see what people were doing after they visited that page.
And if you find, okay, most of these pages are leading to pipeline, even though they got 20 views each per year on the surface zoomed out, it doesn't look like something you would keep, but as you dig into the data, it's very clear that you need to keep these pages.
[00:08:16] Speaker C: Agreed. Yeah, I think there's a, especially when there's a lot of URLs, I think there's a tendency to make really quick decisions because they want to move, move fast and you got to move really thoughtfully about like what's actually impacting the bottom funnel performance. I think it's a really great call out.
[00:08:32] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
So I mentioned at the start around AEO being yet now kind of a new layer to this work in these projects and obviously site structure, site architecture is a really big part of how you think through the migration or consolidation of a site.
We'd love to talk about how a couple years ago all the considerations were purely SEO and now we're kind of having to think through how does this impact search visibility, but then also how does it impact the LLM visibility? And so, yeah, just kind of what's changed and what's more important? Anything that's maybe less important? I don't know if there is, but we'll start there.
[00:09:23] Speaker B: Sure. I would say that technical has become a lot more important as well as crawl depth, because if your crawl depth is more than like three or four, the crawler is not going to prioritize those pages.
How many subfolders you have in your resource center, other sections of your site. That's also important because, yeah, that's higher crawl depth and the further down you go, the less important it's going to be for the crawler and the less likely it is for the user surface. So it is important. If you're doing a website migration, if you're doing a restructure and you find, oh, we're like six subfolders for this particular set of URLs, that's the time where you think about how do we consolidate this, how do we make this easier to surface for the user, easier to surface for the crawler? Especially if these are the more bottom of funnel your money, your life pages.
[00:10:23] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. Does that.
Is that something to speak to Crawl budget there. When it comes to like how not only Google or any of the lms like crawl your site like, importance of just like being efficient in allowing them to crawl it more efficiently.
[00:10:41] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I've always used the analogy of like a restaurant critic.
That's how the crawler will typically treat your site. They're not going to come in and try every single dish on the menu. They might order three or four. And if those three or four dishes aren't great, like, that's going to be your quality rating whether or not you have great content and you could have great content, but you didn't have your best foot forward.
[00:11:08] Speaker A: Right.
[00:11:09] Speaker C: And it might have too much salt.
[00:11:11] Speaker B: Yeah, might have too much salt.
[00:11:12] Speaker C: I was like, you keep.
It's good.
[00:11:16] Speaker B: So in these website migrations and these website consolidations, what you should be doing is pretty pruning content.
So take a look at the content that hasn't performed over the past 18 months. Determine if it's still tied to your core themes.
If it's not tied to your core themes not performing great, perhaps it's tied to like depreciated products or if it was a press release, something that was just a moment in time. Yeah, those are things that you want to prune so that you're consistently putting your best foot forward as far as crawl budget goes.
[00:11:52] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:11:52] Speaker A: So that process being things that are still relevant are important, but not performing. Those would go into a refresh and update bucket and then the ones that are point in time or no longer relevant. Yeah, cool. And we do see that all the time that companies have. Oh yeah, this was your top performing piece, but that was like a 2025 product launch type of thing or whatever, like a very, very specific time. So.
Yeah, cool. Then would love to make sure we cover anything around as it relates to the site structure. You talked about the depth, but also just anything around the internal linking aspect of that. And also today, now seeing and starting to measure and understand better, like Query Fan out from LLMs and just kind of how that's working together and impacting this as well.
[00:12:53] Speaker B: Sure, absolutely.
So internal linking does help with crawl depth. If you're linking older pieces, don't let the pieces get older than 18 months.
But if you're linking older pieces to newer pieces, you're able to take pieces that might have a four or five crawl depth and increase that because crawl depth is essentially how many clicks away is it from the homepage. So you're decreasing that number by adding those internal links. But with Query Fan out, what you really need to do is take a look at all of your content, zoom out, break it into themes and ask yourselves like, okay, do we have enough internal links between all of these clusters or amongst all of these clusters?
[00:13:33] Speaker C: Yeah, that's what I was going to actually ask, which I'm glad you said clusters.
How important are topic clusters still and what do they look like now? Because that internal linking on that is so important.
[00:13:48] Speaker B: They're still, I'd say, just as important, if not more important.
But with Query Fan out, we need to look more critically at these clusters and decide do we need a comprehensive pillar piece or do we need multiple pieces to cover this topic?
[00:14:04] Speaker C: Yep. And that's where the internal linking gets super important, especially in a site migration, making sure that those are retained.
[00:14:15] Speaker A: Yeah, I think there's a lot there for sure to retain those. Build new ones like we said before, opportunity to come out stronger and in better shape than either site was going into it.
Staying on the.
We've kind of been a little more talking about consolidating websites versus just a straight like we're moving to a new cms, but we'll stay on that a little bit longer. Around the idea of merging a couple domains and the content.
Just in that case, some of the other unique things that need to be considered, I think, because we'll shift gears a little bit and talk more about just changing CMS and that side of it. But anything else we want to cover on specifically around merging multiple sites, this
[00:15:11] Speaker C: is still through an acquisition, correct?
[00:15:16] Speaker A: Yeah. Companies merging companies acquired any of that stuff?
[00:15:21] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, I think we were talking about it before we started here. Internal redirects and making sure that.
Well, I don't want to lead with it or say it confidently. I want Erica to chime in. But like the legacy URL or domains being internally redirected and like being left in the internal internal redirects and then causing like redirect chains and stuff. I feel like I see that a lot with brands that have been consolidated. So can you speak to that when it comes to like approaching the two brands coming together and making sure that there's a clear plan for redirects? I guess ultimately, yeah.
[00:16:00] Speaker B: With the redirects, you want to make sure that you're doing the crawl before and after.
Of course, if you're changing the URL, you also have to consider changing all of those internal links that were contained on the two previous domains because it's either going to cause redirect chains or it could cause 404s, neither of which are good for the user or the crawler.
[00:16:27] Speaker C: Yep. And redirect chains being like one redirect, a 301 redirect, and then it hits another 301 redirect. And then the more of those that happen or the more that those are in place are still really bad for that crawl efficiency and crawl budget.
A bot will still give up at some point if it has too many.
Yeah.
[00:16:50] Speaker A: Yes.
So anyone who's not fully aware of that, the objective would be understand where that's redirecting to something that's redirecting. Maybe it's a double hop, maybe hopefully not triple or more, but it does happen.
And then going back to that original spot and changing it to redirect to the ultimate new end destination to kind of get rid of that. So yeah, I think that's good.
And then you already mentioned, but I just wanted to, I guess reiterate, like in the case of consolidation, you're not trying to find a way to make all the content from two sites or three or four sites live together like there is a natural pruning sometimes. You are saying they both have a blog post basically on this topic. So we're going to figure out which one is better or how to consolidate those into one. But the reality is that you're not trying to find a place for every single URL and that there is pruning and consolidation that happens of the content as well.
One other thing we had in our notes we don't think we talked about was just like setting a crawl depth limit around like pagination and some of that.
[00:18:15] Speaker C: That was something that came up this week.
[00:18:17] Speaker B: It was indeed.
[00:18:18] Speaker A: We'll cover that and then we can move on.
[00:18:21] Speaker C: That's a volume, sure.
[00:18:24] Speaker B: So something I ran into this week and something I've seen on some site migrations or just client websites is, is their pagination is either set up with numbers so you can click to each individual page.
Not great for crawl depth, but click to each individual page or it says load more and you click load more and then you get more and more of those like blog and resource cards at the bottom.
The challenge that you run into here is that if it's a larger site, you could be hitting load more 10, 15 plus times.
And then you run into the issue of crawl depth because the crawler is only going to go so far on those blog cards and you won't have a complete crawl. So what you'll need to do in Screaming Frog is artificially set the crawl limit to about 30, because if you leave it with no limit, it will just crawl as it does. It'll see the load more. It'll only go so far and you're going to miss a lot of URLs.
But the next recommendation is you need to let your client know that they need to switch from the load more pagination to the numbered pagination. Because you can only assume if Screaming Frog is only going this far, how far is the user going and how far are the crawlers going?
[00:19:42] Speaker C: Right.
[00:19:43] Speaker A: Yes, well.
[00:19:44] Speaker C: And essentially there's content that it's getting hidden. There's content that's basically getting hidden to some extent, right?
Yeah.
[00:19:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
Okay, cool. The shifting gears a little bit, I think this is something that definitely applies to a company that's just moving from WordPress to Webflow or any combination of. We see it all.
We're moving from the CMS to this cms, but also in consolidations is just around that time.
Using it as an opportunity to also just fix legacy site architecture issues, add or fix legacy schema markup issues, and just kind of again, start fresh, but looking for anything and everything that we would want to be doing in that case to tackle that in that time of migrating.
[00:20:46] Speaker C: So excuse me question being like that's when you can clean that up or that's the best time to do it or it's an opportunity to. Yeah, yeah.
And what are the things that we should. What you should be looking for?
[00:20:59] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:20:59] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:21:00] Speaker A: And I know the answer is yes, it's a good time to do it, but like. Yes.
[00:21:04] Speaker C: What are some, I guess the things that you think are critical to like auditing in that moment or call like in the prioritization maybe.
[00:21:11] Speaker B: Sure. I would make sure that the site has organizational schema.
Well depending on the type of site. But in B2B2B SaaS organizational schema, I would make sure that author pages have author schema, that the blog has article schema, that core pages have FAQ schema.
[00:21:33] Speaker C: Yep.
There's also.
Well, those are. I think those are the fundamental schema markup to do.
But what's the importance of that too in terms of AEO nowadays?
[00:21:48] Speaker B: Sure. I mean it operates very similar to how traditional crawlers would look at it. It just gives them additional context into the purpose of this page. And what other interactive features exist on this page for the FAQ that used to feed into people also ask but now that could feed into query responses in LLMs.
[00:22:12] Speaker A: Absolutely.
Yeah. And I think on the site architecture side you certainly see all kinds of stuff where companies existed for 15 or 20 years and just kind of built and built and built in weird ways. And every little decision along the way for a company makes sense at the time, but over time it does build up to maybe having a pretty unnecessarily layers to the architecture versus being flat saying maybe talking a little bit about what we're looking for there and kind of how we want to make changes to improve there as well.
[00:22:52] Speaker C: Yeah. What do you think are some of the key things to make sure from a hierarchy standpoint need to be in place?
[00:22:59] Speaker B: Sure. I would take a look at the URL structure overall because if you're doing a migration, that's the best time to implement those large scale changes.
I might also look at the navigation. This is a good time to consider user experience to make sure that when we restructure these URLs, how easy is it to surface all of these pages, especially the important pages?
[00:23:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:27] Speaker C: Is there anything that you commonly run into when it comes to that like subfolder structure or URL structure that you feel like is a little outdated or is still being done that shouldn't be done or common mistakes?
[00:23:43] Speaker B: I've Seen occasionally. Like resource slash, blog, slash post.
[00:23:47] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:23:47] Speaker B: Or redundancies.
[00:23:49] Speaker C: Yeah. We were talking about. You were talking about category pages.
[00:23:51] Speaker B: Yes. So with category pages, you have to be really careful with those if you're bringing category pages. Pages over to your new resource center. Because if you remove the categories and you're still keeping categories in your resource center, if they're gone, it's going to break your resource center.
[00:24:09] Speaker C: Right. Yeah. There's a lot of, like, simple. I think.
Sorry, simple things that people think that they're simple but end up having large impact on, like a URL restructure.
[00:24:20] Speaker A: Yep. Yeah. And even you mentioned before about having like an excessive number of subfolders. But we do also see cases where there's a lot of content on the root as well.
Like we've encountered, like every blog post is, you know, domain slash, the slug, you know, and that kind of stuff where it's like, oh, we need to put some structure around this and like, give it some organization as well.
[00:24:47] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. The slash post, I've seen a lot still.
That's an interesting one. Just from a logical standpoint of nux standpoint, clean subfolder categorization, or more logical. Or send signals to even the users that there's some thought put into this that can go a long way.
[00:25:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
So I guess for anyone who might be listening to this because they're in the middle of a migration or preparing for one, I think we encounter all kinds of situations. We get pulled in when the migration's already happening. We get pulled in when the migration's already happened and there's issues. We get pulled in when there are people that are planning ahead. So let's just talk about timeline and planning side of it in terms of how far ahead to plan what should be happening and kind of like days, weeks, maybe even months ahead of that kind of maybe. Depends on the scale of it.
And then what should happen after? I think so we can start with before.
Just like some of the best things that companies can be doing, marketers can be doing to make sure they're preparing and kind of covering all their bases.
[00:26:03] Speaker B: Sure. When I learn a client's having a site migration, my immediate question is what are their goals behind the migration? What is the purpose of the migration and what type of migration is it? Because I've seen ones that are just cosmetic. They're doing a rebrand.
Really nothing more is changing. So I'm a bit more focused on the technical side of things to make sure the site is fast.
I've seen ones where websites are merging, where subfolders are changing, where the CMS is changing, and a couple of other things are changing, where they're depreciating products, where they're adding products, acquisitions.
So it's good to have all of that information up front because knowing this might change your approach to what you prioritize.
But the next thing I'm going to ask for, if they have it, is the redirect map and access to staging.
[00:26:57] Speaker C: Yeah, staging's huge. And a lot of times I don't think, you know, sometimes when we work with clients, they don't like, think that, like, you need to, like, look at that before anything goes live. They're kind of just like, you can look at it live, but there's a big. There's importance on pre and post.
Sorry, go.
[00:27:14] Speaker A: No, yeah, I was just saying I think there's also staging, in my experience, has more of a design connotation, like, we wanted to see it built and make sure it looks okay.
Not understanding the value of being able to crawl things and staging and some of that stuff. And then you can also just mess up how you do it in staging too, where, like, all of your staging URLs start getting indexed and, you know, that kind of stuff, like, there's.
[00:27:42] Speaker B: I've seen that happen before.
[00:27:44] Speaker A: There's a lot there. But yeah, I do think the staging is super important for crawling ahead to catch some of those big issues so that they get fixed before it goes live.
Yeah. And then what about like, so I liked your. Your answer immediately. Step back. What are your goals?
Why are you making this change?
Especially, again, in that context of it's not like a merger.
We kind of have to because these companies are merging. But when someone's just choosing to move to a new cms, what are your goals from this? What are you trying to accomplish? I think this is really solid.
So you can crawl before, crawl after. There are a lot of different things you can do. What about the performance benchmark side of it and how you think about that leading up to and preparing for a migration?
[00:28:36] Speaker B: Sure. Well, I would also ask, have you made any major changes to your website over the past 18 months?
Because when you look in the data, you will see different anomalies from maybe those changes, maybe from Google algorithm updates, maybe the site broke for a number of days.
But having all of that information up front is what's going to help you set your benchmarks.
Because realistically, right after the migration, it's going to take six weeks, sometimes two months to see the Site come back.
So having those clear benchmarks is going to help you communicate progress as to how things are moving. And do you need to make any changes?
[00:29:21] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:29:24] Speaker C: Yeah. What can I also. And this same topic, hopefully I'm not shifting too much but like what type of expectations need to be set when it comes to performance for a migration like that, for site migration in general?
[00:29:38] Speaker B: Sure. I mean I always set the expectation up front that this could take up to two months to turn around. The first week or two is going to look the worst in the data. That's something that you'll need to annotate.
[00:29:53] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:29:53] Speaker B: So that when someone you know a year or two from now looks at our analytics says, why was traffic down? Why were conversions looking so bad at this time period? It was because of the migration.
[00:30:08] Speaker C: Yeah. And to connect the dots, that's the importance of having those benchmarks.
[00:30:12] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:30:12] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. I think that that's the planning is so important because we get looped in sometimes so late and can't set those expectations or you try to set those expectations and the snowball is already like building and it's just like, well, here we go, decisions have been made and you just got to kind of try to mitigate the impact.
[00:30:33] Speaker A: Yeah.
Another thing that came to mind that we've been through is kind of through that process companies, maybe it's a little bit less on the technical side but like wanting to create kind of like mini brands or sub brands around products that they have in that process, which then sometimes does create like, oh, you were very logically describing what this thing did and it, there was clear intent around it, whatever. And now you've named it this thing that has no brand history, no brand equity, all that stuff, just weird things like that too that I think can happen that do.
Understanding that ahead of time and being able to talk through that ahead of time can help people understand the trade offs, I guess is my point.
Whereas if it's like, oh, we already made this change, then it's a little bit harder to maybe unwind. Site structure might have been a little bit different. That kind of stuff.
I've always had the position of is this a performance decision or a business decision?
If it's a business decision, that's fine. If you're like, hey, we believe in branding this and we're like the next seven to 10 years we think this is going to be awesome and that's the direction we're going as a company, great, then that's a business decision. I'm just going to tell you What I think the trade offs are and then we're going to mark that. But that is potentially the stuff that happens and I think can be a helpful context layer when talking through any of this stuff around consolidating or migrating sites.
Is this a performance decision or a business decision? Which I think comes back to your point on goals and kind of stuff too.
[00:32:30] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. And like specifically like URL changes. Hey, should we switch to this domain? We. I've. We've been asked that a bunch over the handful of years. It's like yeah, we're thinking about rebranding as this and you're just like cool. Like that's a great. If that's what you believe that the business is going like I can't tell you not to buy that domain. Like there's all these things that we will do to make sure everything migrates over. But I think that those questions and expectation setting is like really important.
[00:32:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
In terms of monitoring that obviously you mentioned the timeline and we've known from all of our experience that post migration initially is that worst point and it kind of just builds back up from there.
Having the benchmarks is important. What are the key things or monitoring maybe talk through what are some things that would, would be a flag of like oh, this is not just a natural like dip before it recovers from the big change. It's like there's actually an issue post migration that needs to be changed. Like anything that companies should be monitoring and watching for I think would be helpful. Helpful to talk about as well.
[00:33:42] Speaker B: Number one is indexation.
[00:33:43] Speaker A: You knew it.
[00:33:45] Speaker B: If you're changing the domain name or URL structures.
[00:33:48] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that that's pretty critical and common, a common mistake in those. Um, and is there any other ones that you look out for or you see most oftenly?
[00:34:00] Speaker B: Uh, that's the number one I look out for. And then I'm looking at ranking recovery.
[00:34:06] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:34:06] Speaker B: Invisibility recovery.
[00:34:08] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.
[00:34:09] Speaker A: And is that I, I think there's a lot of value in.
For companies and marketers going through this to understand, not to just look at it at purely the top line, but to spend the time to go understand, look at individual high performing blog posts. How are those recovering? Look at all blog posts in isolation. Look at core pages or just the homepage, not just domain overall because I think that that does obscure it kind of makes it a slower moving ship. Whereas you can see some things really like bounce back or maybe even got to new highs much quicker to where you can have some of those More early indicators that this is working, this is bouncing back and it's going to start to add up with more and more of that.
[00:35:02] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Like new users as well.
Especially if you have your login from your homepage, those aren't going to be new users going to the page. So that could artificially, you know, skew traffic numbers in recovery. So you want to make sure that you're indexed, you're showing up and you're bringing the right people to the new site.
[00:35:24] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think also on the. Like on top of the indexation and mistakes too, just to call it out, because I think it's important. There's multiple layers. It's like. I think I've. We've run into a lot is like improper. Like improper canonicalization.
[00:35:40] Speaker B: Oh yes.
[00:35:40] Speaker C: That comes with that lack thereof is big. You've seen some accidental. Like almost like it's. It's not technically de indexation, but things start tanking because those signals aren't there. Or like the migration happened and then the canonicals are pointing to the old URL or URL structure or the wrong one. That seems to be something that's very common.
[00:36:00] Speaker A: One of our very first clients had that. Yeah.
After a rebrand, I think. Or maybe it was a site migration.
That's one of the first things we uncovered was that everything was canonicalized to the domain. Yeah, yeah.
So we want to wrap up with talking about common mistakes. I want to throw a curve ball because this is something that I've been thinking about. We didn't talk about or plan and maybe there's not much to discuss. But I have struggled more recently to take out the.
Again the companies merging or anything. That's a very forcing function and that makes sense. But just choosing to move to a new cms, I feel like it's harder and harder for me to justify.
There used to be a much greater disparity and I'm sure there are still people on some really weird and crappy ones and that's fine. But like.
[00:37:09] Speaker C: Or homegrown. Yes.
We had one in the past year that was still like a custom CMS.
[00:37:14] Speaker A: Yeah, but like WordPress to Webflow, Webflow to Framer, Framer to WordPress.
It's harder and harder for me.
It's a lot to take on. It's a big project for a company.
There's that performance hit that you have. However much it might be all that.
Should there be less justification for that? Just choosing to move to that has the performance across them normalized much more. Or do you feel like there are still some that are just truly bloated or non performant in those ways.
[00:37:58] Speaker B: Well that one. It depends.
[00:37:59] Speaker A: Yeah, that's fair.
[00:38:02] Speaker B: I have seen it where we were speaking a little bit earlier to legacy sites and the way they're built is just quirky and that makes it really hard for the developers to work on it whether it's internal or whether it's a vendor. Like we have a client that just redid their site and it was a legacy site and every single page was built a little bit differently. So multiple people had to work on it and they had the knowledge, institutional knowledge spread across all of these people.
So for simplification purposes they migrated to
[00:38:41] Speaker A: a new site to avoid dev bottlenecks and stuff.
[00:38:47] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. Well like there's all those considerations about who's, you know, classic conversations around who owns the website. Like I remember there was like a time period where a lot of decisions, a lot of people were migrating to webflow because of like the performance and improvements that you'd get from how that was built. But then like that wasn't at the time. It's got, it's gotten better but it wasn't super marketer friendly from a UX perspective.
Um, all these types of things. There's nuance, there's nuance to how you make that decision and like it can create problems because like you get the performance improvements but then the team that really like is trying to help grow the business through the marketing aspect things is not able to control it the way they need. And then you have now you've created another problem that needs to be fixed.
[00:39:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:39:31] Speaker C: And that can be true of like a WordPress theme, poor theme choice which we know of some big ones that cause problems.
[00:39:40] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:39:40] Speaker C: So like it's, I think at the end of the day you can make a CMS work for you the way you need to but you have to take into consideration all these different other aspects. Variables.
[00:39:50] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I just, it feels like there's, I completely agree with those. It feels like there's maybe been, I've picked up on a little bit of a rise of like I want our team to move to the CMS because I like it or because it worked well for me. It reminds me of mid 20 teens demand gen marketer who's Marketo certified joining a new company and being like we're going to move off of Pardot and onto Marketo and you're like, but they're pretty much doing the same thing. It's just more like your personal preference kind of thing. That's more the situation where I feel like there's probably a good number of cases where it's more of a personal preference and unnecessarily kind of bringing a lot of challenge and potentially harm if not done right to the company without a lot of upside there, I guess is my point.
If you're not having the dev bottlenecks, your team already has access, you can do all that.
It's harder for me to understand why you're migrating, but yeah, bit of a tangent there.
Yeah.
First of all, before we get into the kind of common mistakes, just anything else that we didn't.
That.
Sorry, we did have one other thing I wanted to mention on the last topic leading up to that stuff, performance benchmarks.
I think that's another area when we were talking about seeing individual URLs or things trying to pick up. That is now an area where can and should have some pre and post benchmarks around LLM visibility.
And are we starting to get more share voice or citations or any of that kind of stuff to where you could see on that side of it as well? It's not just traffic, it's not just the kind of classic organic search markers. But also I think you would definitely see some of that when you add schema or improve the structure, improve crawlability, that you would start to see the improvements on the LLM visibility side as well.
[00:42:04] Speaker C: So is there any other specific things to look out for?
[00:42:08] Speaker A: Less of a question, more of just. I forgot that I was going to mention that if there's anything else you
[00:42:13] Speaker C: want to add, anything to add on?
[00:42:16] Speaker A: No, no, I think we're good. All right, so I interrupted my own question. Anything else that we haven't talked about real quick before we get into the common mistakes?
[00:42:27] Speaker C: I think. No, I think. I don't know. I think we'll. Got anything else that you'd want to add?
[00:42:32] Speaker B: No, I think that's everything for me.
[00:42:34] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:42:34] Speaker C: Cool.
[00:42:36] Speaker A: All right, well, we'll just wrap up kind of. We've already touched on here and there, some of the mistakes, but just wanted to maybe more concisely package up what we see as some of the most common mistakes around a site migration or site consolidation that we want marketers to be able to avoid. Yeah.
[00:42:53] Speaker C: What would you start with?
[00:42:56] Speaker B: One thing that comes to mind is page speed.
[00:42:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:42:59] Speaker B: So especially with CMS migrations that are more cosmetic than anything else, the images don't have defined height and width or they don't set the video as an iframe and then there's a whole slew of other mistakes that really slow down page load speed. So you migrate your site. Okay. We didn't restructure URLs. We really just moved from one CMS to another. It looks the same. Why isn't it operating?
[00:43:26] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, the same in that same category. How do we feel about Core web vitals as a proxy for understanding which what things to fix for page speed?
[00:43:38] Speaker B: It's important make sure the site lazy loads. Make sure your HERO images or a video, if you have it in the Hero isn't too heavy.
[00:43:46] Speaker C: Yeah. Yep.
Yeah, agreed. Like it's so important and I do think it is probably in the top five three mistakes that people probably don't think through or are being thoughtful about.
[00:44:01] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Or even just the design isn't really changing.
But like the previous CMS had either a baked in like asset compression or something like that that is no longer there or like a preload or. Yeah. Any of those kind of settings or things that were already built in before that just didn't carry over. And you're literally saying it looks the same.
Like you said, why is it performing worse? There's a lot of those things that
[00:44:35] Speaker C: could also creep up with these mistakes. Could say what's the impact? What's the why? Why is that so important? What can happen if you don't? If you have a poor loading page,
[00:44:45] Speaker B: all of these ladder up to quality signals.
If it's really bad, the user is going to notice it.
Even if it's just medium, the crawler is going to notice it.
[00:44:56] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:44:56] Speaker B: Because. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Go ahead.
[00:44:58] Speaker C: No, no, no, no. He saw you.
[00:45:00] Speaker B: But with migrations, especially URL restructures, it's a reset.
So that's why you want to come back better.
[00:45:07] Speaker C: Totally.
[00:45:07] Speaker B: With your new site. Because if it's slower, the user experience isn't as good as it was before.
Google will pick up on that and LLMs will pick up on that.
[00:45:18] Speaker C: Totally. I think the one of the things. Well, I like the way you framed about it being a reset, but also I think that's just like a great litmus test that I don't think people understand is that like if you're just. It's thinking about the user, it's the whole same thing around build content for humans. But I know we're talking about building content for bots too and all that on the new world. But like just think about the end user. Right? Like if this is not loading well for them, then what's that gonna do? For the engines that are trying to surface you for visibility and growth.
So if it's slow, it's gonna be slow for them. Yeah. I wanna just emphasize that I don't
[00:45:54] Speaker A: remember off the top of my head what that I think there is kind of a latency cutoff for the LLM. I don't have it off the top of my head. I'm like when they're making that query on your site to get information, if it's not loading fast enough, then you're just out. I wish I had that stat off the top of my head. But yeah, there is a very direct correlation there. Like if it's not loading fast enough, then that does also directly impact LLM visibility or can. I should say.
Cool. And then we talked. I'm trying to think of some of the other mistakes we talked about.
Internal redirects or redirect plans.
Avoiding the redirect chains.
[00:46:43] Speaker C: Planning, not planning.
[00:46:45] Speaker B: Not planning.
[00:46:45] Speaker C: Telling your agency too late.
Yeah.
[00:46:48] Speaker A: Not having good clear goals for why.
[00:46:54] Speaker C: Why you're migrating. Yeah.
[00:46:56] Speaker A: And then there was another one. I think we talked about a mistake around the content itself.
[00:47:04] Speaker B: The EEAT to prune content and to make sure that you have authors assigned.
[00:47:09] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. So not pruning content can be challenging. Maybe you're bringing over bloat or conflicting stuff and then obviously the authorship stuff we talked about. So the alternative to that being you don't do it well and then therefore don't send clear signals. Don't have the authority. Don't carry that over.
Yeah. I mean, it's almost hard. I feel like we could talk for a whole hour on a true list of mistakes that are possible because there's so many variables, but at least cover on some of the big ones.
[00:47:40] Speaker C: The other one I'd throw in there, which Erica threw out, was the benchmarking, but the pre and post crawling and unstaging, all that. I think that doesn't happen as often as you would think.
Which can cause problems.
[00:47:57] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:47:57] Speaker B: Sometimes things happen at the very last minute and you can catch it in a crawl.
[00:48:02] Speaker C: Right.
[00:48:02] Speaker B: In staging before it gets pushed live.
[00:48:04] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah.
Also fun one that we didn't call in relation. It's to that point is publishing freezing?
[00:48:14] Speaker A: Yes. Oh yeah.
[00:48:15] Speaker C: Yeah. Can you speak to that at all? And how that impacts. Like if you don't do that, what happens?
[00:48:23] Speaker B: I mean, I've run into it with a lot of clients, but it is good to do a content freeze ahead of a migration. You don't want to be making too too many changes because the focus should be on making sure that the site is launched in a stronger state than it was before. And once that is pushed to production, the site is live. That's where you can start publishing new content. And that can actually help you.
[00:48:47] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:48:48] Speaker B: In the long run because you're sending new signals to crawlers.
[00:48:52] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, totally.
[00:48:53] Speaker A: Yeah. So hypothetically, your team is making small updates to the site and you're publishing, you know, four pieces of content across, you know, whatever reports, blog posts, case studies, that kind of stuff.
[00:49:06] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:49:06] Speaker A: Per week. And you say, hey, everyone, two weeks out from this, like, you're locked out.
No more tweaks to the site, no more publishing. You keep writing the content, but we're just going to bank it.
And then at the end of that, once you've migrated, then you can start to publish that and push that out.
[00:49:25] Speaker C: It happened within the past quarter once. It's just like, weren't notified that the new website went live, but old website stuff was still being published, the old website, even accidentally. And so then there was this gap of, hey, we don't have, like, where's this new content? And you're like, so then there's a disconnect and, you know, you're missing out. And so I think that's a big one. Yeah.
[00:49:49] Speaker A: And I.
I think the other thing I just wanted to mention real quick is like, they're like, mistakes are possible.
Do your best to avoid them.
Things can still go wrong. We obviously work with clients, but if you're just doing this on your own, you can fix. Things are fixable. It's not like it's been etched in stone.
We can do that. It's just a matter of prolonging the pain of maybe degraded performance or some of that stuff that is there, but it is fixable. It is something that can be recovered. Um, and we just want to try to help people do as much right as we can before that switch gets flipped.
[00:50:41] Speaker C: Yep. Yeah. Yeah, there's. Yeah, there's varying degrees of severity, but that everything's fixable.
[00:50:46] Speaker A: Yeah.
Cool. Anything else?
[00:50:50] Speaker B: No, I don't have anything to add.
[00:50:52] Speaker A: Awesome.
Well, this has been great. Thank you so much. It's a huge, huge topic for clients and just a lot of companies that need to go through it for one reason or another, and it's important and they want to get it right. And so if anyone ever has any questions about it, feel free to reach out. We're happy to try and point you in the right direction or help you out if there's a fit.
But, yeah, outside of that.
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[00:51:39] Speaker C: Sweet.
[00:51:39] Speaker A: Awesome. Thank you Erica.
[00:51:41] Speaker C: Thank you Erica.
[00:51:41] Speaker B: Thanks for having me.
[00:51:42] Speaker C: Yeah, of course. Look forward to the next one.
