Relaunching Websites: SEO Strategies for a Smooth Transition

Are you ready to level up your website relaunch game? We've got you covered with advice on search engine optimization, content migration, and promoting your strongest content while ditching the old, low-performing stuff.

We also tackle the nitty-gritty of optimizing URL structures and redirects for a seamless transition. You'll learn how a short URL base can work wonders and why preparing for potential future restructures is essential.

Finally, we share SEO housekeeping tips, explore the significance of having a well structured sitemap and discuss tracking 404 requests, core web vitals, and accessibility issues.

Highlights
00:00 Intro
00:36 Overview
01:13 Strategy #1: Content Migration
08:05 Strategy #2: Slugs
19:06 Strategy #3: Redirects
25:41 Strategy #4: Google Search Console

Links
Franz Enzenhofer's SEO book: https://www.fullstackoptimization.com/a/understanding-seo
Google Search Console: https://search.google.com/search-console
Redirection plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/
Yoast plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/

Steffen: 0:00

But then it's important that after this step, you should recover above and beyond the previous level as quickly as possible. Today we're talking about relaunching websites, search engine optimization, yay.

Dominik: 0:16

SEO, or how we Germans like to say, zero, zero. So it's actually the second part of our series, right Relunching websites.

Steffen: 0:26

It's not even a planned series, it's just like a spontaneous series.

Dominik: 0:29

Yeah, And the last time we mainly talked about migrating content right And now we tackle such engine optimization.

Steffen: 0:36

What are the topics that we want to talk about today in regards to SEO?

Dominik: 0:42

Yeah, i mean we have touched on it in the last episode as well, but we want to talk again a little bit about content migration strategies in terms of SEO. We want to talk about redirections, what it means like, why this is important, and about slug strategies So when changing the structure of your permalinks and about monitoring and indexing.

Steffen: 1:04

Right, then let's dive right into it. Content migration strategies. What are strategies to migrate your content? We talked about this in our previous episode in depth, and I think, first of all, you should always consider not migrating all your content to your new website. While this might sound counterintuitive, i think it makes a lot of sense to promote your strongest content with your future website and to maybe ditch some old, not so well performing content, or to think like really like take the time to look in depth at, first of all, how your content is performing And then make to make these decisions, and one other strategy that I liked when we migrated a large website was still considering search and content to move to the new website, like news articles or press and press archive, but deliberately not setting very old content to no index, like setting it to not be indexed by search engines, because you want search engines to pick up your latest content and to feature that, because when someone's searching for a topic and you show them a news entry that is was relevant for that time, that might not be relevant today anymore, and then people might go to your website and quickly go back, because they see, though, this is from 2018.

Steffen: 2:45

And I was actually looking for something newer, and this might be actually be a bad signal for search engine optimization.

Dominik: 2:52

So I mean, let I have some questions with regards to that.

Dominik: 2:58

So in general, i think in the past they used to be like basically, it was the same with content as it was with press right, there's no such thing as bad press. So I would say there's no such thing as bad content. This was like probably the opinion a while ago, but nowadays we know that if you have poor content, this can also like lower your ranking in Google. You touched on outdated content. Now would you think, or do you think there's like some other reason with regards to like evergreen content That's not like really time, time relevant that there might be the reason why not to migrate it or why the why it could harm your ranking position?

Steffen: 3:52

I think I would rather focus on strengthening the evergreen content, and when you create a lot of content on a website, you might actually be competing with yourself on certain keywords when talking about same topics again, and I think then it might make sense to just like promote your evergreen content even more by ditching another part of content and rather migrating whatever you talked there about, or a video that you shared on another article that you might migrate that maybe into that article. Combine that together And I think there should be nothing wrong with evergreen articles. And I think the theory that there is no bad content Was that what he said. I think there probably is bad content, and what kind of bad content is there? And I think it's only when it's not relevant That's bad content.

Steffen: 4:57

Well, of course, you could say, maybe it is relevant to someone at some point, yeah right. But search engines they look at how people perceive your content and if they think it's valuable, right. And how do they know that? How do they measure that? They measure that also by how quickly people come back from going to a website, from the search engine results, and how quickly they come back, and probably other metrics and so on when, for example, you're using other analytics tools that I'm only guessing here. But, yeah, they take these signals and an old news entry could be just irrelevant, right, and then it becomes bad content and could become a bad signal for search engines, while at the same time, it could be interesting for someone else. But that's, i think, why you would want to still keep it on your website, because you could. It's could still be discovered by other people on your website, or you could cross link it within your website to make it relevant in the right context.

Dominik: 6:05

I think maybe it also makes sense in these kind of situations especially with like news articles or events or like this, like structured stuff, right To think about when migrating also adding structured data like the schemaorg stuff, so that Google can can better structure it as well and read it mechanically, instead of just parsing the content and thinking it's a website. It could actually put it into the right category and then feature it only on the news, and maybe in such a case it's better not to take it out of the index but to actually give it more context. Right, give all the structured data and add that.

Steffen: 6:50

Of course, like you could, you could say the thing that when you give that information to Google hey, this is a news article, it's actually old, that well, it should be Google's job to decide whether or not to show it to someone, and then they shouldn't rank you bad on that. That will be a very easy answer. Mostly, i'm taking this stance and with that in this regard, because of an experience with a website, a very SEO heavy website, that we relaunch and where their SEO manager, a very experienced person, made this decision, and I took that as an inspiration, that, and I understood why he did that, and I just like, tend to like this approach of taking this as an opportunity to focus really on and understand really what is our strongest content. How can we focus on that and get rid of all the stuff that isn't so well, just like as an act of cleaning as well, and I think this, like unindexing old stuff, seems to be related to that to me, but don't take my word for it.

Dominik: 8:00

All right, maybe like let's let's change the order a bit of our topics, because I would rather talk about slug strategies now, because when you migrate the content, you can either keep the exact same structure of URLs, of permalinks, or you can say no, i want to change something about that. And yeah, what can you change and what would be some of the motivation behind it?

Steffen: 8:29

Yeah, i think when you are migrating content types again, let's stick with an easy one like news, and the URL on the website is on the existing on the old website is slash news, slash, then article name, then I think I would probably most likely advise people to not change the URL and to just keep that. If you want to migrate the content from from that slug Because even like every redirect that you introduce from news to something else might potentially be a challenge, right, because it needs to be read, indexed, even if you are like setting the redirects up correctly and so on But I think I would try to minimize the risk of changing slugs. However, this is a very easy case and you might have much more deeper slug structure, right with slash company, slash about us or slash success stories, slash some category name and whatsoever. And many times with relaunching website, you change the structure, you change the menu items. That's most of the times where a structure comes from from your else. You change the menu structure And then suddenly the URL changes and this is where you really got to pay attention to, because this could affect very well important content from you And well, first of all, you could set up some redirects, right, but this typically, then, is a very manual process, because you might be like not just replicate that content but menu, set up new targets, new types of pages and aggregate content differently.

Steffen: 10:18

But when you have a very content heavy website where there might be a dozens or hundreds of pages from a certain category that are restructured in a different way, this might be, this might be challenging, right. You could set up some automatic redirects or some redirect concepts like structures, and say everything under that URL gets redirected to that URL and everything one for that goes to gets redirect to that. But just even like the process Can be a danger, right, because you could, you could make make mistakes over what's your experience with. that was like setting up these kind of.

Dominik: 10:57

Can I? can I also like add something still to the slug Slug stuff? I'm just my mind hasn't fully processed this yet Because, like in general I think from a technical point of view, i always advise having like a really simple you are a structure, right, so it should be the pages like don't have a base, so it's like Domain slash and then the page name or page slug, and for and for every other content type you should have like a base, so it's like either blog or like articles and then news or I don't know, maybe even success stories, if this is like a content type And so on and this, and then it should be slash and then always the slug of the article itself or the this content type, and then there are of course exceptions for like categories or tags or something like that. It should be either a base slug for like a blog, then at best you do like category.

Dominik: 12:07

You know, because, like from a technical point of view, it's like you have the word category, then slash and then the category slug, right, so that you know when you see you and when you're out of you are that this is like an archive or a taxonomy page, right, or like an archive page and there is no like Way of mixing it up with actually a an article itself or like a piece of this content type. So this is like from a technical point of view, it should always look like that, because it makes it easier Not to make mistakes as a content editor and also for WordPress in routing. But is this also the the optimal Zeo strategy, because we have a lot of clients who actually want to have different types of. You are else structures right?

Steffen: 13:04

Yeah, i like the classical way in WordPress also when you create pages is that it creates hierarchical structures right for non structured content. This like landing page stuff.

Steffen: 13:15

I totally agree with you that, like when you have structure content, or even like if you have a certain type of landing page, like Case stories or yeah, blog or whatsoever, that you create a specific content type for that custom post type and then have a specific Simple base and a simple, short URL. I think Some years ago it used to be rather popular that you have a nested URL structure where you put in all the types of keywords and categories into the URL structure And I can't tell if this is right or wrong, but I feel like from what I've heard, picked up from the industry, that this Is less important these days and rather it can be an advantage to keep your URL and your base short, because this also tells people about the, about the title and so on, and makes it easy, kind of easier, to share your else if they're shorter and so on, so on, so on. But it also provides another advantage makes it makes it easier to migrate to a new navigation structure. What do I mean? like if you have case stories under your main domain, slash case stories, slash then the name. This could still be in the menu under Company, about us, cases or what's ever Like have have a place nested within the site, but you might want to change this nesting and might change it to just like under slash company, or rename slash company to just about us, or Or just like put a top level or what's ever. And these are the decisions that are usually made during the relaunch and where it would help if you can restructure the main navigation without having to touch the UL structure and the UL base.

Steffen: 15:17

And one person, france, and so he's a SEO Consultant and we work with him on a fairly large project and also read his book and really like that. It's a very pragmatic approach to SEO. He basically says that everything you need to know is what Google tells you, and you only need to know the Google tools, like Google search console and so on. I really look at things and understand it like he's not. He's not a fan of SEO hacks and secrets and so on, and this doesn't exist in this opinion. I really liked his approach because it's so clear and so focused And one of his recommendations was to choose an even shorter URL base.

Steffen: 16:02

So let's say you have blog posts, or let's say cases, and you could call them case stories.

Steffen: 16:12

You could call them case studies, you could call them cases, and you might want to rename that at some point from one to the other and so on. And he said instead, how about you just like call it C, slash C, because even if that changes to or it could be customers or even changes later, it's not that relevant and people don't want it too much about that C letter. You could probably even just like go through your content and then have every post time A, b, c, d, e, f, g, whatever whatsoever, and then just like use that as a way to distinguish content but then really put focus on the actual spelled out name, the title of the page. And he advised us to do that with that huge website relaunch And we had to then actually go into WordPress and hack a couple of things to remove the hierarchical structure of certain pages and post type functionalities, to map that to a much simpler strategy. And this was done to be future proof kind of, to prepare already for future restructuring and future relaunches. I like that.

Dominik: 17:30

So, yeah, I really do like this approach, like not putting emphasis on the URL structure right Or on what is in the URL. Because if you have like something like success stories and then you put that in the URL and then you decide from a communication point of view that you want to change that to like case studies, then you have to change the URLs at some redirections and so on And this can cause some bigger issues or bigger changes, Whereas if you just have like a single letter, nobody will care if that changes and it doesn't match like whatever you decide to use in your communication.

Steffen: 18:12

And also you talked earlier about categories and slugs, right, but like. I think it's important to distinguish that. How I understood that advice was like to use that for archive pages, right, but not to put the categories within the URL of a of a post, right. You should not add tags or categories there because these might easily change and you don't want these to cause redirects.

Dominik: 18:44

Yeah, exactly, and you see that a lot of the times, right, that clients want that behavior Like, and then, like you have multiple categories, then you have to pick a primary category. What if that primary category changes? then you add a redirect and it's a mess and it's not really needed, right? So, yeah, but now we can come back to the question that you asked me before about redirects, because, like, there's so much that you need to consider, or why is actually? why is it important to have redirects and to set up redirects? right?

Dominik: 19:24

Because over the years you have gathered, like, what a lot of people like to call link juice, right, or a zero ranking for your website, and then Google has all of these sites, pages, index and indexed, and if you then change the content of your website and all these URLs that were once had some link juice now result in a 404 and are not found, you will lose that link juice completely right, and this is basically the reason why you need to make sure that all the pages that were indexed before are still are still reachable and lead to a new page that either with the same content or to like a different page, so that you just like keep the ranking or the juice on your site.

Dominik: 20:22

And to do that, i mean there are multiple ways how to set up redirects and all of that, but we tend to use a WordPress plugin called Redirection And this offers like really a lot of functionality. You can even like have it set up automated redirects If you rename posts or if you do like other things. Then you can do like WordPress based redirects. So that means that you first have to hit the database, then it reads it from there. Or you can also create redirects for Apache or Nginx to get like a faster redirection without loading the entire WordPress environment and so on, and this is like super nice to work with.

Steffen: 21:12

What do you typically like to do Like? do you, these days, like to always add everything in redirection in the plugin, or do you, when do you prefer, like rather adding something to the hd access directly?

Dominik: 21:27

Yeah, actually, since you can like in in redirection, there's a you can have different groups and you assign types to these groups And you can say this is like an Apache redirect and then it will add all of the redirects from this group directly to the hd access. So that is usually like because it's really nice for the client to have this UI, to have the functionality to edit things themselves, and yeah, so that's why I prefer to do that. And usually I mean the thing is also and this if you have millions of redirects right, you actually don't want to put them in in your hd access, even though it's like the fastest way to do redirects. The hd access is read on every request. So the bigger the hd access, the slower the request will be right. And this for, like I don't know, maybe 100 or hundreds of redirects, that's not an issue. But if you get into thousands or even millions of redirects, then this becomes a big issue And I'm trying to think about a page with millions of real and that sounds pretty interesting.

Steffen: 22:43

Usually I think it's, it's worth to consider. Right, because usually you would say, like hd access is faster because it happens before the application, it happens on whatever. But yeah, right, it needs to be read, it needs to be processed at the same time also.

Dominik: 22:57

Yeah, so usually we, what we do is and this also ties in a bit with the next topic And we look at the side map, right? or let the client look at the side map, see what pages are actually indexed And then have them either, like in the best case, you can come up with a general redirect, right? So, for example, if you want to redirect slash success stories, slash star to slash cases, slash slash star, like this is something easy You can do. It's just one rule, right? You just need to make sure that the slugs of the individual, like studies or items, hasn't changed For.

Dominik: 23:53

But for pages that are on the on the first level kind of, then you always usually have to do this manually, because a lot of the times these things change right. So maybe instead of company, you now call it about us, and this is like a manual mapping that you have to make And then you can basically export the side map to Excel sheet. The client can edit it with Google Docs And then we import this into the plugin and then have all the redirects set up already. So this is like super, super nice right.

Steffen: 24:33

Yeah, i think this is bringing us to the final topic about the Google search console. One more thing also about the plugin.

Dominik: 24:42

sorry, because another nice feature from this redirection plugin is that you can track all the your 404s, right. So it will create a separate lock where it lists all of the four, four requests that are made to your website. Like, a lot of the times there's also a lot of garbage in there, like if for, from, like a bot or like I don't know, like weird requests, but a lot of the times it's like okay, there is a or if there is a URL that makes sense and that is actually like should lead to something. you can see that in the list and then either create directly a redirect out of that, a redirect rule, or just ignore it or leave it like that, right. So this is really nice to do housekeeping afterwards and to make sure that everything was done correctly. Yeah, so, but this leads us now to the last topic. I guess.

Steffen: 25:44

Sorry for changing things. Yeah, because that's a good good point. Because, like SEO, I think it's always important to to see SEO and not a one time thing.

Steffen: 25:56

There are multiple levels of SEO, but typically, the the biggest part of SEO is regular housekeeping and and keeping things up to date and monitoring things and so on and and not forgetting about things doing it once and forgetting about it. But, yeah, keeping up to date with things and following up with how your site performs, what people looking for, where they're landing on your page, and so on, and this is something you can additionally monitor very well with the Google search console. Yeah, it tells you right. Let's just say and assume that everyone knows what the Google search console is right, but not sure everyone is aware of its importance and how to use it, specifically when it comes to doing a website relaunch. And I think one of the most important things when it comes to website relaunch is, first of all you kind of said it before looking at your best performing sites, so those which are ranking most, where you got the most traffic or impressions on, and then ensuring that, at least for the top whatever that might be might be 10, it might be 20, it might be 100 or more at least for those you should definitely make sure to set up proper redirects, even if the entire type of page concept changed right, but let's say you have a lot of brand SEO, so people are searching for your company name and then one of the first results would be your About Us page.

Steffen: 27:43

What you don't want is you don't want, after the relaunch, people being led to a 404 page, or, of course, you could redirect to the home page, but still, why not just like send them somewhere when they can now find the new information about yourself, like providing a good search experience for your visitors and treating like that and not just like as a technical issue of the search engine?

Steffen: 28:07

No, you got to make sure that people are directed the right way and then it will also be easier for you to pick up your SEO performance again. Because one of the rather common things is that after a relaunch, you might get a dip actually in search engine performance because things are getting unindexed. The search engine might just like, yeah, first look at things, what's going to happen now? and might set you back on a couple of things. But then it's important that after this dip, you should recover above and beyond the previous level and you want to ensure that this happens as quickly as possible, and that's where redirects and things like that and good user base kind of that finds the right things will certainly help you with ensuring that gets done quicker.

Dominik: 29:10

Yeah, and the sitemap is of really big importance because usually, also in the old days, it was okay, google is scraping your site, so they started the homepage and then goes through all of the links and then from there, finds all of the content and you have to hope that it finds the correct links, and so on. But you should always have a sitemap XML or sitemap index XML that lists all of the posts that you, or all of the pages that you want to be indexed, right, because then you can also go in and say, hey, google, here's my new sitemap, please index it now, and so on. And this is what you should basically do after the relaunch and make sure to also submit the sitemap. The sitemap should also be included in the robotstxt, but it's always like from my experience seems at least faster if you manually submit the sitemap to the search console and then you say, like, reindex the page, and then you have to wait and see what kind of changes there are. Right, and Stefan, how do we then usually generate these sitemaps?

Steffen: 30:35

Well, we like to use some kind of plugin and it's called Yoast. I think that's by far the most popular right. There are many other SEO tools, but we like it, we like to stick with it, and I think the way it creates sitemaps is very nice. or, moreover, the way you can configure the sitemaps, like to exclude also certain things or to not redirect assets like image URLs, to like its own URL and stuff like that. you can just like configure a couple of things which are really nice and handy and to exclude categories or archives if you don't want to have them, and so on, and so in the end, you end up with a nice, not just like one level sitemap, but you then have like multiple sitemaps, also for certain content types and so on, and I feel very confident with Yoast doing a good job on creating and maintaining my sitemap.

Dominik: 31:46

Yeah, also a lot of people have used it before because it's so widespread. Then also together with like ACF and WPML and like some of the other big plugins that we use. There's usually like, if you have issues, someone has run into them before, right, So it's quite easy to get help or to find solutions. Yeah, Yeah.

Steffen: 32:13

and then, of course, in Yoast you can do a lot more stuff, like add some metadata, manipulate your not your slug, but your, yeah, the metadata, like the title structure and things like that.

Steffen: 32:26

But I think that's just like general SEO stuff. It doesn't have to do too much with a website relaunch. Um, yeah, what else? Oh, right, something else about the Google Search Console. it doesn't just tell you stuff about URLs, right, it also tells you stuff these days more about content analysis in terms of not or not content, but like looking at your website and add the UX of it, like it can give you signals about the core web vitals, right, about the page speed performance, about accessibility issues, when things are too small or too close to each other and so on, and it likes to send you alerts about these things. And you should really take these things seriously and work on those and monitor those. And as part of a relaunch, i always also advise to take like a screenshot of the page speed results and the core web vital results before the relaunch and then after it, and then like 28 days later also when the core web vitals are updated, and we're even like later than that to see how things developed over the course of time and throughout the relaunch.

Dominik: 33:52

Yeah, this is always like something again with core web vitals And we've talked about this before right, that, because it's like delayed, you never really have a real time view and lighthouse is like your best bet kind of to see in what direction it's going. You know how they are always like a number of sites perform green, a number performs yellow and a number performs red, so sometimes you actually see a dip that you haven't really in a lot of sites index and then it goes up again And it's just there to be sure that like the green line should go up and all other lines should go down. And if you do that, like after one month, like you should have done things correctly, you should have done a good job. Yeah, I think, other than that, there's nothing I can think of right now. So good, and thanks for listening. And if you have other suggestions what to do, just write in the comments below or get in touch with us if you want to discuss things further. Yes, yes,

Siegfried, deploy!

Relaunching Websites: SEO Strategies for a Smooth Transition

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