Hi, everyone. I’m Rebecca Yu, an SEO manager from Jakala. Today, I’m going to walk you through how to communicate SEO challenges with your client.
Often, website migration is one of the biggest SEO challenges an SEO can have. And frankly speaking, the technical part isn’t the most difficult thing. It is communicating with a client about migration issues and how to plan around it.
Often, SEOs are informed about the site migration way too late, sometimes just days before a launch. So, in order to avoid all this chaos and try to rescue our sanity, it is very important to understand site migration in non-SEO languages because here it comes, like site migration in SEO terms.
What is a site migration in SEO terms?
So we have all the domain migration, platform migration, and structure migration.
We can talk the whole day about it, like what are the domain name changes, how to move to a new CMS, blah, blah, blah.
But then, this is not the language that clients understand. They will be like, “What is a CMS migration?” Okay, you’re moving home in the backend then.
How do we translate site migration details into non-SEO terms?
So here comes the site migration in non-SEO terms because this is what the clients understand.
For example, rebranding to a new name. So we are rebranding. So when an SEO, you kind of catch these hints from migration, you need to understand what’s going on behind the website.
So, I am going to go through a couple of them. So rebranding to a new website. You’re trying to add to a new country’s website. That’s obviously international SEO, and moving to a new website, that’s obvious. And we have adding to a new CMS, another obvious one.
What’s not so obvious is upgrading to a new CMS version. I think this is the one that a lot of us will miss. A new CMS version might not have all the necessary fields as the old CMS. So that’s why, as an SEO, you want to make sure all the data is correctly transferred from the old version to the new version. I think this is one of the most tricky ones.
So here comes the site migration in non-SEO terms because this is what the clients understand.
For example, rebranding to a new name. So we are rebranding. So when an SEO, you kind of catch these hints from migration, you need to understand what’s going on behind the website.
So, I am going to go through a couple of them. So rebranding to a new website. You’re trying to add to a new country’s website. That’s obviously international SEO, and moving to a new website, that’s obvious. And we have adding to a new CMS, another obvious one.
What’s not so obvious is upgrading to a new CMS version. I think this is the one that a lot of us will miss. A new CMS version might not have all the necessary fields as the old CMS. So that’s why, as an SEO, you want to make sure all the data is correctly transferred from the old version to the new version. I think this is one of the most tricky ones.
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Another one is changing the menu and navigation. You might start to question, “It’s just changing the menu and navigation. Why does it sound like it’s moving home? You’re moving from one site to another. No, I’m just trying to change the menu.” Well, actually, because changing the menu structure might involve all sorts of link changes, from taking away the whole section to adding a whole new batch of links to the menu.
So that’s why these are all the major changes to the website. I would say when working through all these hints for SEO migration, what you can think of here is, “What are the major website changes that can impact SEO?” Because sometimes the client might not know it would be your website migration. So, the best thing you can do is, when communicating regularly in your client meetings, you try to catch these hints so that you’re able to identify a potential migration early on.
