Interview With Mindy Weinstein: A Small Business SEO Checklist
Interview With Simon Cox: Migrating Sites Like A Pro

He answered the questions of our channel members on the topic Migrating Sites Like A Pro. In case you missed the chat, you can read this article :)
Why do you think SEO needs to be part of a site migration?
Astonishing how many businesses really do not think it is a big deal... until afterwards!#serpstat_chat
— Simon Cox (@simoncox) November 6, 2019
Nice one Montse! SEO’s are often employed by marketing departments but really do need to make friends with the dev teams else its mayhem!#serpstat_chat
— Simon Cox (@simoncox) November 6, 2019
What does your site migration SEO planning include?
And i do mean ALL. i want to know every URL being used on the site, what search engines ‘think’ are on the site and what URLs people are linking to - even from 10 years ago when they were .asp pages#serpstat_chat
— Simon Cox (@simoncox) November 6, 2019
What strategies have you used to handle redirects?
Good thinking to look at the inactive URLs too. It can all get a bit overwhelming sometimes though.#serpstat_chat
— Heather Harvey (@Fizzle_Up) November 6, 2019
It's an infinate scroll so you keep scrolling down the serps for a big long old page to pull the URLs from. Useful.#serpstat_chat
— Simon Cox (@simoncox) November 6, 2019
If you are using a CMS that has a Retour plug in - its certainly worth using after a migration. Helps pick up odd URLs and send them to somewhere meaningful!#serpstat_chat
— Simon Cox (@simoncox) November 6, 2019
How do you monitor site migrations?
Although we now have GSC Domain Properties, I pull the data into Google Sheets to monitor progress and share it with clients.
What is the most common issue you have had to fix after a migration?
I always do a crawl immediately at launch and usually have a preprepared checklist to go through. Includes a list of the links I am expecting to redirect to their new location.
I get called in after migrations because traffic has tanked! If non-SEO's read this please call me before you migrate! Most common issue has been a total lack of redirects and planning.
What was your toughest migration? Any horror stories?
We assumed there would be a lot of sweeping up in the following weeks - probably was with stationery, business cards etc. but for the site we pretty much nailed it.
Also 1 job where I added hreflang to thousands of pages through a CMS process as no dev resource available for at least a year.
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