What to expect after your site migration goes live — Doug Bell // Searchmetrics

Quotes

• “We started from the bottom of the funnel and worked our way up. We had our site speed looking really good, the architecture was great, we felt confident about the process we were using through Search Consul, and we even felt good about the 18,000 links we needed to migrate and all the mapping that happened there.” -Doug

• “In a B2B company likeours, the website serves two purposes. Purpose number one is, it informs our customers and prospects with all the things that we can do to help them. The other thing is the utility for us. It has to be a site that allows prospects and customers to show interest and in return produce leads for us.” -Doug

• “One of the things we discovered as a part of the testing process was that our Marketo farms were not speaking properly to the site. That was our final leg of anxiety piece.” -Doug

• “Overall I would say,dont get too caught up with the voices of other people instead have a really good reason to do this because it is a huge exercise, big resource hog and there is a lot of risks associated with it.” -Doug

• “For the first 2-3 weeks, you want to see that the traffic for your site is stable.” -Doug

• “We are seeing much higher engagement with the content on the site, so these are all things that are early indicators of future success but for the moment, all the things we look up from a, is the site performing better standpoint.” -Doug

• “I think thats an important lesson and Doug I appreciate you being so candid. You can go through all these site migration processes and the truth is, you are re-shuffling the deck. You are giving Google a lot of data to comb through, analyze and interpret, evaluate and rank. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesnt.” -Ben

• “So we went from 7 to 4.1 and within the next week and a half, we got a 1.2 from a load standpoint. Our data pages have improved fairly significantly. We got better linger time, we have actually more people going to the forms so these are all very encouraging.” -Doug

• “Think of your website as a product. Almost as important as any other product you have in your portfolio. It is a long game, make sure it is stable and the house is in order.” -Doug

• “Its been great but I am also looking forward to that useful negative feedback. So far, we have gotten some. We have folks who have an incredibly strong design eye and they have pointed to maybe a few pixels and too much space here and there but overall, the qualitative has been really good.” -Doug

• “When you launch your newly fixed website, you still need to be open to accepting data. This is just the beginning of the process where that initial set of data is Googles first interpretation in terms of what your site visibility is going to be. Then you also have to consider some macro concerns, in this case, the coronavirus crisis.” -Doug