Bob Tripathi: All right folks welcome. This is Bob Tripathi with Digital Sparks Marketing. And
today you’re going to be talking about a super critical important topic and that is the Web Site
Migration. And I have with us Samantha and Samantha is with Investis Digital. And Samantha
you’ve done this side migration and I think it seems pretty basic to most people but it’s not. And
I’ll tell you my personal story I used to work for Discover and Discover bought a domain name
called Discover.com for 20 million dollars. But we were still on DiscoverCard.com i’m talking
2008 by the way Super. Probably a lot easier back then right. No no kidding. Yeah. i’m
antiquated sorry. But you know the issue was how do you migrate the site. Right. So our
developers thought they can just flip the switch. But that’s not true. So we created a bunch of
processes but I would like you to tell me what are some of the processes involved when it
comes to that site migration.
Samantha : So Web site migrations just like how Bob quoted his own experience it’s really
become this huge trend that whether you’re a business and acquiring other businesses and
trying to consolidate or it can be as simple as moving from HTTP to HTTPS. Yes be secure
nowadays or changing your content and hierarchy and architecture of your actual site currently
and possibly redesigning right there’s a million and two reasons you could be changing but
when there’s the movement of page eight page B and you want to keep your valuable traffic
your valuable authority.

Samantha : And ultimately keep those conversions it’s very critical to have a migration strategy.
So I like to preach that two thirds of your time should be invested in actually creating a proper
pre migration strategy. That way you’re not you’re mitigating any risk you’re not going to drop in
the search engine results. You’re not going to drop with your traffic and possible conversions in
business right. So I think everybody whenever there’s like migrations happening they get caught
up in the aesthetics of it like we’re redesigning it’s going to look so pretty and here’s our
branding of merging all this together. But what people need to remember is that there’s actual
performance factors too. And those performance factors are what we need to be focusing on.
So making sure that your websites in a really healthy stance with search engine optimization
making sure like your black links are still firing away and that you’ve reconnected those. So I
think those are some of the key things and making sure that again you’re mitigating that risk
then you can launch and go live. that’s the easy part the hard part is making sure that you’ve
got everything set up correctly in the forefront.
Bob Tripathi: So you know like when you talk to developers you’ll be like oh yeah we’re going
to do you know a 301 right and that said and that’s what they think is flipping the switch right.
But as I understand and you know very well that’s a pre during and post thing. So what is the
pre How do you prep that.
Samantha : I actually i’m talking today a digital summit just 30 minutes to give people that
checklist.
Samantha : So I can’t rattle it off the top of my head bob but there are a lot of factors that will
make sure that your site is healthiest to relaunch. And there are tools out there to allow you to
check if you’re redirects or firing correctly. So I usually shout out to things like Screaming Frog

you know crawling your site I think you get actually a couple hundred free users of it before you
even have to buy a license of that tool. that’s just one way you can track where your best
practices stand on your site. What kind of redirects might be necessary as you change up your
content and hierarchies. And then from there each TTP status.IO will actually allow you to also
check if 301 redirects like what those chains look like if you’ve got too many redirects or if
everything’s firing. Next thing I know those are just a couple that I like to shout out and hopefully
people can take away and start implementing if they didn’t already know so.
Bob Tripathi: So what is what is the timeframe like you know you talked about SEO but like you
know for example it’s not just flipping a switch right. So how much time should people allocate
before that they do this kind of planning like 30 days 60 days.
Samantha : My favorite is when people come to me and they go Oh we’re redoing our site and
we’re making it brand new and it’s going to launch in three months. So we’re just starting. I
literally laugh and I don’t mean to be rude but it’s just not realistic. You know if you’ve got a
larger scale site like I said you might spend up to 13 months just with this pre migration strategy
and mapping everything out. And that’s pretty average. Right now our company Investis Digital’s
working with a company that’s moving a hundred and twenty two Websites into one. that’s a
huge. Undertaking. Yes. So with that you can imagine they are a year to a year and a half out
with just planning and making sure everything is online before ever even getting to possibly like
building the wire frames and actual design elements that would be something that’s almost last
on that list. Then you said at Live. So start first with the strategy elements understand your
content strategy as well. That way you don’t have to rebuild a site based on content you didn’t
know you were going to have yet test for those health factors of your search engine optimization
then start to think about the design elements you know and how that user behaviors playing a
factor.

Bob Tripathi: So when you’re migrating just to check off what you mention is you got to talk
about your redirects your SEO your internal linking your brand being your design obviously what
other factors are there. Did we cover everything. I think we covered everything and the tools
Yeah so the web and the tools that you mentioned.
Samantha : I mean it. Everybody’s in their own kind of stance because every migration that’s for
a different reason it could be super simple like the HDTV HDTV yes or it could be very complex
and you could be working with several global sites and at that point then you’re dealing with
each rough laying around to make sure like different foreign languages are aligning and being
read by the search engines. So depends on the complexity but high level I think we touch upon
everything but just remember to be realistic with the timeline and expectations of when
something can relaunch. it’s probably not gonna be tomorrow if you’re just starting out.
Bob Tripathi: Yeah I think one of the things that Matt Cutts back in the days to suggest about a
SEO is when you’re migrating and that’s all I did discover when we migrated from Discover Card
or Discover.com as you take your content in piecemeal right. So is that what you would
recommend.
Samantha : Yeah you gotta start with the content. I mean that’s the foundation of everything. it’s
why you’re Web site exists. And so to host this content make sure you know what content is
going to be there. it’s got. Outdated content start to address what you might want to refresh
might what you might want to delete and then what you’re definitely keeping. Yeah. And so we
like to say keep combining delete and that’ll help to understanding how your formatting your
website. And then again what were your frames your building.

Bob Tripathi: Nice. Good good good. So one question and one last question before I let you go
is people are still doing this micro sites.What’s wrong with them?
Samantha : They think I think people are still hung up that it’s like this easy fix right. They’re like
oh let’s throw up a microsite and it’ll solve everything. What they’re not understanding is that
Google really cares not is about one authoritative domain one.
Samantha : And you know as a director’s duty you really want to be splitting up your time and
resources and money across multiple Web sites. No. So there are ways to be strategic with one
Website to make it impactful for different business goals and you know to not confuse people.
But again setting it up correctly with a strong content strategy first I think is that foundation.
Bob Tripathi: This is great. Thank you so much Samantha. So thank you for doing this. Thank
you. Thank you folks for tuning in.