When you’re making the investment in a new platform - scaling your business, coordinating internal adoption - we want to help make sure all your T’s are crossed.
The basics that we’ve got covered.
- Category / Collection CLP Redirects - Permanent
- Product Redirects - Permanent
- Product Feed Updates - Google Shopper Feeds, Instagram Feeds, Facebook Feeds
- Google Tag Manager Transition if using GTM
- Ensuring Sitemap Is setup
- Ensuring Robots are setup
- Load Sitemap into Google Search Console
Together with the developers, we’ll configure all the settings and test them in the new environment.
Planning + Preserving Organic Traffic
During your internal planning sessions, the team responsible for SEO should coordinate the migration in detail with designers, developers, project managers etc.
You’ll want to keep tabs on all the important areas that directly or indirectly affect SEO and your organic traffic channel.
We can conduct an audit of the current platform and environment in order to answer the following key questions:
- Are there some custom features (SEO-related extension and custom code on the current site) that need to be transferred to the new platform?
- Check if any of these are used for some SEO settings on the current site.
- If there are some additions to the default platform functionalities, we collaborate with the developers to see what is their opinion about the extension/solution used until now. Does it have some negative impacts on the site performance?
Based on these conversations - your ecommerce team, your CSM and development team, your SEO manager (here at IM we offer a retainer service!) can strategize on what needs to be delivered for a seamless migration.
Post-launch tasks:
- Submit XML sitemap to Google Search Console
- We’ll check for 404 pages and act upon them by creating 301 redirects
- Confirm Google Analytics is collecting data
More Housekeeping
Category Tree
- Collaborate closely with the design team (and the rest of the project team) to make sure you catch any main nav or layered navigation changes and make redirects plans based on insights
Collect the data from the current site
- Crawl site to pick up all the on-page elements, meta robots, canonicals etc. as all these settings will be transferred to the new site.
Sandbox/Staging Environment
Check if all the products, categories, images, ALT text, attributes, and metadata are correctly migrated.
- Check if all the canonicals are in place
Indexation Strategy
- Tweak or replicate the indexation strategy.
- Prepare a new robots.txt file and make sure there are no conflicts with meta robots.
- Check if the staging site is hidden/blocked from crawlers
- Confirm robots.txt file is uploaded once the site is live
XML Sitemap
- Review of the sitemap. We are checking if any customizations were made before and speaking with the developers to replicate these.
Structured Data Mark-up
- We make sure to replicate it as well, along with possible customizations that were done on the current site.
- If there are some areas for improvement in terms of structured data markup, we’ll provide a path to resolve during this migration time
301 Redirects
- We do a crawl of the staging site, see if there are any changes in the URL structure, and prepare the 301 redirects for the devs to implement (this one can be very time-consuming)
404 Pages
- We check if the 404 (custom design) page is created
GSC verification
- We make sure that GSC verification is transferred to the new site
Additional topics to speak to your team about include -
- Sending an email to your users with accounts letting them know they can reset their password before they try to sign in and get prompted.
- It takes time for your users to adjust to your new site - you’ve done the work to update your experience, but your returning customers may take some time to get used to it - don’t worry, they will!
- Revenue may drop up to 15% in the first - but we’ll ramp up and gain that back - and more!
- You’ll want to make sure your merchandising team preserves your top rated pages. Your most visited, highest converting categories remain the same throughout the transition.
We’re not a marketing agency and we don’t know all the marketing initiatives you’re running – but we want you to understand that the migration may impact these programs.
Ensure your marketing team knows what changes (SKUs, URL structure) will be made in the new platform, what is the timing of the migration, and validates all links in ads and email campaigns so they are correct post-migration. We don’t want customers clicking on ads with invalid links.
We want to make sure your team feels confident in this transition, please feel free to reach out to your CSM with any questions or if you need more information.
