An SEO-led Migration Plan
My first day at iCrossing, and I was thrown into a 100K URL website migration. My group director at the time, Claudia, thought I was going to quit after a week. Fortunately, I had lived through several six-figure URL migrations already.
LG Electronic’s US site underwent a host and design migration/update in 2019. This LG 5.0 Site Migration included SEO at every step in the process, where I led a team of developers and content-focused SME’s to plan, execute, and support with technical guidance.
Website migrations can be a tricky process in terms of transferring organic search authority to new domains. Planning for a migration means developing a full plan of attack - with thousands of URL redirects, metadata optimizations, and other content and technical updates set in staging before the new version launches.
Missing out on proper redirects, or not updating metadata appropriately, could mean a huge drop in organic traffic for not only a single page, but an entire website.
As team lead, I developed a roadmap featuring SEO recommendations
In order to mitigate a heavy loss in organic visibility and prevent drops in traffic, the SEO team delivered:
A 60K URL redirect list, condensed from 100K, along with canonical tags
Metadata (title tags, descriptions) for more than 30K B2C and B2B pages
Product schema markups across B2C and B2C
On-page copy optimization updates, footer copy migration
Code consolidation recommendations
Real-time SEO consultation and site monitoring
Extensive post-launch QA of all SEO elements
The outcome saw only a temporary drop in traffic and rankings before normalizing
Organic Rankings saw the biggest impact post-5.0, dropping 35% MoM in July. A drop in rankings is normal post-migration, caused by Google re-indexing a website post-launch. But by August, just a month later, rankings of brand and non-brand terms normalized across Page 1 of Google.
Organic Visits saw a temporary decrease of 2% in July. This is also a normal occurrence post-migration, due to Google re-crawling (re-indexing) a new version of the site. After only a 4 day drop following Google’s indexing of 5.0, traffic moved back up to pre-migration performance before increasing more than 20% going into Q4.
This is still the most successful website migration I have ever been a part of to this day (and I am updating this in 2023, with many migrations under my belt since LG 5.0). For our part in this project, iCrossing’s SEO team was awarded the 2020 MediaPost OMMA Award in Search Marketing.