Prioritizing Technical SEO Issues with Cody Gault

Key Takeaways

hi everybody this is lauren baker founder of search engine journal welcome to today's sej show with me today i have cody galt of conductor how's it going cody what's going well how are you today pretty good thanks pretty good so um today we're going to talk about technical seo and site migrations this is actually a follow-up because we had cody on a webinar a while back and we got so many questions coming in about site migrations like i don't know about you cody but it feels like to me there's so many companies right now that are either they're re-platforming they're changing their design they're changing their brand maybe they're integrating uh trying to integrate in the wordpress for their blog or this and that and there just seems to be a lot of of like major migrations going on right now and then also micro migrations at the end of the day are you seeing anything similar out there yeah i'm seeing a lot of it since all i do really these days is technical seo and migrations all the time we get we talk to a lot of people and that's been that's been pretty common actually lately it's you know urls aren't changing a whole lot but every like i said everybody's moving to a different platform they're trying something else out it you know some phase migrations like i said micro and scope maybe you know part of the site seen a lot of it cool cool so before we get started talking about migrations and technical seo how about uh if you tell our audience a little bit about yourself yeah so my name is cody galt i am the migration services lead over here at conductor um i've been doing seo for something like if i wrap up all my time together about 10 years or so a little maybe a little bit over that but the last like three three years i think maybe a little over three years it's been almost purely migration related technical seo um at this point i don't even know if i can do keyword research i can because i just did it but it's it's rough um and then you know i work for conductor we're an enterprise seo platform uh lots of bells and whistles there so we the nice thing about we get to see a lot of different clients a lot a lot of big sites uh but you also we get to work on some small sites also great great and it seems like you've really carved a niche in the industry or from a service perspective with working on migrations how did you get into working on so many of them and how did you like uh how did you cut your chops when it comes to migration migrations yeah so i used to work at an agency i've got an agency background i've also worked in house and one when i was at an agency is when i really started to work on you know migrations in-house we had some maybe like micro migrations going on right but the agency's side is where it picked up and like the first big migration i did was an international migration um it was actually yeah it was years ago it was actually for puma at the time this was like four years ago something like that um so a nice way to be thrown in right you get a big international client you're like all right um nothing's at stake here yeah nothing's at stake it'll be fine so did that and then at the time i was on a whim my wife and i were like hey fun kind of live in new york and because we had some friends living there and conductor was based out there so i contacted them and i had mentioned that i was doing you know migrations and everything and so they're like well hey like we have we have migrations that come through how about you uh how about we set up like a migration services thing and you can just run with that i was like sure because i'll tell you i prefer technical seo and all that too about any other aspect of seo so to me it was like well it's one of the more i would say it's one of the hardest things in seo or at least the most stressful to deal with and so i was like yeah that'll be perfectly fine i'll just do that for three years now awesome awesome yeah it's funny because like i first got into migrations by not actually doing them but cleaning up cleaning up past migrations so you know how it is you get a lead someone's like hey you know our traffic dropped why'd your traffic drop well you know we decided to do this last year oh okay i see oh you got a bunch of 404s you got a bunch of links pointing to 404s you guys didn't redirect last year when you do this oh no no no well who managed this oh this agency or this guy used to work here this person needs to work here they're gone now oh who who took care of it oh this agency but we haven't worked them you know so just like it's it's sometimes it can be like a nice archaeological dig right because when i start going through uh sites that have gone through migrations and start to have that problem you end up uh you end up finding a lot more sometimes than just that one migration sometimes like i've worked on projects where you know there's a html version of the site there's a asp version of the site like just going through those 404 reports and search console can be amazing because you can see like everything is being hit and then like going through like broken link reports like in ahrefs by the way today's episode is sponsored by ahrefs and adzuma which makes today's episode possible so please check them out when you have a chance but just like going through those broken link reports and stuff like that you can identify so much and then you bring it up they're like oh yeah we did used to be on shopify three years ago we decided to change that or we did do this and it's amazing like post migration the ability to connect those dots and fix it can have so much benefit right but the big thing is someone's going through a site migration what are some ways that they can pre-plan to make sure that if you're switching from one domain to the next right or from like one platform like maybe you're switching from woocommerce over to shopify plus so what are some ways to pre-plan uh and eliminate risk when you're going through a site migration yeah i would say the biggest thing is where we we start everything off it's where it's the first thing that i really learned when i started migrations you know on our side we called a stack rank document really what it is is a url inventory a lot of people give it different names different core url list things like that so we start from the top we're like well here's the domain so what's everything in existence that's tied to this domain so you know i'm like are there any rankings you know you've got all sorts of companies out there that are pulling rankings grab and export like what pages actually have rankings i want to see what's you know getting traffic today uh google analytics also great you know google analytics you kind of have a couple ways you can go with too i like to grab about a year's worth of data sometimes a little bit more but i mean there's nothing stopping you from going five years back you're probably going to find you know those ancient urls if you really want to i don't typically do that i don't usually it's never really come up that i've had to but sometimes you know you go back a little bit longer just make sure cover your bases and then you know backlinks like i said that broken links report really good low hanging fruit you should look at it any time you're working on site right um if you have multiple backlink uh databases do you have access to you know you've got majestic you've got ahrefs you've got moz uh semrush has one too then there's some others out there find out what had backlinks at one point you know so we grab all that we do crawl the site and we just compile it because once you do that like you can look through here's every url right and then you can look like well this url is like ranking for like 500 keywords it's got like 300 backlinks 20 root domains you know stuff like that well now i know yeah i want that and then from there you just go through i go through that whole list we'll look through and it's a great way to tell like all right here's where the value is you know here's everything that's good and you also find some of those links you know you're talking about like three years ago they're running off of something that's you know old like except asp you'll find those urls in there then you can make the decision like well do i want to redirect them how long have they been redirected right or maybe it's just case sometimes like ah let's just leave it i mean i did a migration recently where we found some urls that the last crawl date from google i think was like 2017 and just no links no rankings no traffic didn't show up anywhere i was like i'm not going to really worry about that one but yeah yeah so i really you know the summary of it a url inventory every source of truth i can find grab it put it in and then from there it's a case of making a decision of do i want to migrate this over is there value there or is it better to just you know 404 this let it die because sometimes it is you know sometimes there's just stuff that doesn't matter and if you're going to make sure it's actually 404 right so like one thing i typically find in migrations is that sometimes people will utilize um you know a cms solution for the bulk of the site but maybe like you know if it's a site that had uh menus on it they'll upload pdfs via ftp sometimes i'll upload them to the non-secure version and the secure version so they still kind of linger around so ftp images different types of files things like that things can actually not only be linked to or in the index but at the end of the day like you don't want a pdf file from 2015 hanging around that says a car wash costs like you know twelve dollars when now it's like 25 bucks like maybe car wash is not the best example but you know what i mean like you don't want to have like historic uh incorrect information hanging around because that always leads to an issue with customer service so that's that's that's really cool to hear and um we like i said we had a lot of questions that came through uh when we did our webinar a while back so um i'm gonna go ahead and and start kind of going through these uh the first one comes from our friend raymond at knifecenter who uh who stacked up a lot of questions during the whole migration webinar raymond's question is given a choice between 301 redirects and maintaining an old url in a new one and canonicalizing the old way canonicalizing to the old at least initially which is better least risky option so sounds like the question is it's a little bit confusing but it sounds like the question may be you know when you're introducing all these new urls should you immediately redirect old to new or should you launch the new canonical to the old or vice versa let google pick up the canonical and then redirect in the future yeah so i've actually gone through this exact situation there's a couple years ago now so things you know google there's changes but i would say the safest thing to do is just do the 301 redirect right 301 redirect is gospel whereas the canonical google may honor it they may not and in the past like this is something that uh i tried the client one time because it was a phase migration so we were like well let's let's see like we want we want to move things over but we haven't you know fully pushed the brand change so let's try it out they went through they tried it and google was just like no we're good with the old url we're not going to show the new one and you know part of that's probably comes down to at the end of the day you have all those internal links pointing to the old url you have the sitemaps point to the old url all your backlinks are to the old url so simply canonicalizing it to the new url isn't really always going to do something it's not to say it won't always work i'm sure there's cases where it will but in my experience it it just didn't work as well so i think it's one of those things you can do if you're like hey we're getting the new site set up we will do a brand push but we want to get things up and running and we'd like to try it out yeah go for it but don't necessarily expect that google is going to honor it if you really want those new urls in the index you really want to move things over do the 301 redirects and let's be real the way google is it's probably going to take a little bit before they even update the index to point that old url to the new one you know when you're searching for things so yeah in summary i'd redirect it if you really want to move so just to reiterate the canonical is a suggestion google's may they may honor the canonical they may not chances are if you have any issues with your site from a crawl perspective right they may not honor it also if the two pages have different content i've noticed like even title tag content that could lead to it not being honored but all around different content or even a different template serving the content differently may not be honored as well whereas the 301 is an absolute right it's like boom bang like this is where it is there ain't no going back right so google is going to definitely follow that just like when you're managing your staff you give them an open-ended suggestion they're like what what what did he say you're like do this right now it's due tomorrow eight o'clock okay i got it so awesome awesome good to hear i think there was a big trend with uh utilizing canonicals with uh migrations in the past but just seems like there's a lot more issues than need be okay next question um is it true that 301 redirects can slow down your site um by any means or is it best practice to add redirects to every old page to the new page so let's let's start with uh is it true that 301 redirects can slow down your site yes so i think it was about two years ago maybe three there was a guy who did a test now unfortunately i can't tell you his name right now i can't remember it but it is in my history from a tabs on another computer so if you look up like do 301 uh you know slow down my site hd access test you he should come up on google something like that anyways he ran a test and he did find that yes they will slow down the site but the slowdown starts like with when you start getting like tens of thousands i believe and even then it's a very miniscule amount of you know slowness so do they slow down the site yes they can but typically at the at that level that you're talking i don't think most people are dealing with that many redirects so you know it's it is something to consider and if you're a site you're like got a million pages and you want to redirect all of them i'd probably err on the side of caution of just saying well let's just look at actually what's got value because odds are most of those pages don't so you know it's time to take into consideration but in my experience with the stuff i've been doing i haven't really seen it be an issue um any other there's another thing too is how are the redirects being done you know you've got nginx you've got apache i'm most familiar with apache of hd access and his page checks the list so you know something to look into but in general i don't worry about it too much but if you're going to get into tens of thousands it's good to do some testing and maybe think of a another plan and this also goes down to the like you know where where is google finding or where even the is a user finding the 301 redirects like you never ever want to have an accessible 301 redirect on your site right that's just ever yep you know and a lot of the times it is a developer shortcut well we'll just we'll just redirect everything but they don't change the navigation or anything so you just have like the old url linked to the navigation fires and redirect if you have the redirect accessible on your site it's definitely going to slow down your browser or sorry not slow on the browser it's going to slow down on the server load um on that end uh however you know it is very natural to have external links which 301 to the new location to your site right so to your point if the page is getting a lot of traffic and it's linked a lot you can easily go see a sorry just reading one of the comments um you can easily go and look at the the most prioritized most valuable links that are pointing to your site and go through and contact those publishers and those entities and then ask them just to update the link at least that way google isn't constantly hitting a 301 from like i don't know cnet or washington post or something like that to your site on an ongoing basis right especially like if it's something that's actually referring traffic and users and hitting your server logs all the time yep um so that's a really uh good tip on that side just try to slow them down into your point just um just handle uh you can also prioritize the 301s right so um when you're doing uh when you're doing a migration next question that comes in from evangelos from greece evangelist asks uh is it better when you're doing a migration to change the title tags and meta descriptions or leave them as is so is it good to have some consistency with google with doing that migration or should you just do it all at once or should you would you recommend phasing how does that typically work on your side yeah i personally i like consistency if you can hold off until the migration you know moves over and you can wait like you know say two months especially you know we've got all these wonderful changes of titles and h1 tags going on right now um their own things for a loop you know i say hold off meta description personally like we know it's not a ranking factor it's better for you know your click-through rate so you probably change that one all you want uh but on the title i would hold off now where i think the caveat is is if you're going through a brand change right and you know you're changing everything you got to change it okay just do it like i don't think it's going to be that big of a deal there what i would say and we've had on occasion happen is you're like well we want to change the you know we want to do some changes now and the migration is three months out it's like well yeah like go ahead change titles like you got some time two months out sure a month out yeah you probably see what's happening i i don't know if i'd risk it then um but if you've got a lot of time beforehand like make the changes because you'll have enough time to see how google reacts but in general you know it's just another one of those little things that can tilt things ever so slightly and may make a change that's for me why like i say hey hold off as much as you can because you know things matter i think it was just the other day or last week maybe this week that uh john mueller had said uh i don't know when he said it but you know layout changes can impact things lots of things uh when you do a redesign too can can change things so there's all these little parts and if you have control of anything like you know if you can hold off just just hold off again with the caveat that if you got three months beforehand yeah go for it fine by me that's actually a good transition to the next point so i saw that as well it's just like you know changing themes templates stuff like that can definitely affect your seo like and if you just do a search on google for like fastest shopify themes or slowest shopify themes there's multiple different sites that just like list all the themes the fastest to slowest and you know what if you're on a pretty fast uh theme and you decide to go to the slow one because someone in marketing thought it looked better at the end of the day then that's definitely going to affect your seo like it just makes sense right so try to go in the opposite direction if possible and i really like that point about you know what you don't have to wait until you don't have to wait until the migration goes live to update those title tags like you can do it beforehand test it out and at least that way you're giving google some consistency right so if your future title tag you can apply a month before or two months before or whatever uh you don't see your rankings drop or maybe you see a little bit of an increase or maybe google decides to rewrite it to like some inbound h2 from us another page of your site then uh you know at least you're you're kind of prepping right you're uh you're priming the pump so to speak from a migration standpoint so uh going back to to your last comment about changing themes and changing templates what are some great ways to test the usability and performance of a site from a speed and rendering perspective before you go live like are there tools out there that you can utilize to test that staging environment before you uh before you catch yeah so i would say that's that's one of the areas that sometimes we get lucky sometimes we don't at the end of the day it depends on how much access to that staging site we have and there there's again there's some caveats right it depends our favorite answer so i have in the past used you know webpagetest.org sometimes you've been able to oh yeah love it uh sometimes being able to get page speed insights through also to check to you know see what they're saying there and those are the two that i primarily use i know there's some other tools out there i think there's a you know there's speed curve i think that's it there's gt metrics i believe i just stick with you know page speed insights lighthouse audit report and webpagetest.org so if you have if you you know can tell your developers hey can we open it up so that we can use webpagetest.org i believe you can go in there you can set like a custom user agent or you can send in uh authentication credentials so you can get in there that's a good way to test things you know see how are things going how are those changes reacting the one thing you got to keep in mind though and i see this all the time the staging environment is on a server that is not as good as production and so i've run the issues where things are super slow and it's not in any way you know the same as production five seconds slower but it'll move over it'll be everything will be fine so you do have to keep that in mind that depending on how that server's set up it may be slower two staging environments often they don't have everything fully loaded and developers may not be willing to make all the changes that they should and sometimes stuff goes on live and then you deal with it but it does give a good baseline to see how things are going and then you know at the end of the day we still have you know dev tools we have our network tab and so we can look through there and see hey how are how are things going speed wise you know how long's things taken to load and all that so there are options um generally i want to say for servers like in the speed aspect it's like 50 50. uh sometimes there there's no difference in the actual uh between staging and production speed and the other time it's really slow but it is enough to give you an idea now i will say sometimes you are just locked out and you your only option seems to be your network tab in which case like you know you've got network cab you can run a coverage report to see like unused bytes and everything but you got to let them know like hey this isn't necessarily fully accurate things are going to probably appear worse here than they are just based on what's going on but it's an enough of a hint i will say though like the best thing you can do when you're looking at it just check the image sizes that's usually every time i see something it's the biggest culprit followed by like bloated javascript but guess which one is actually going to probably be fixed images so you know check for those things but yeah in summary webpagetest.org pagespeed insights network tab on your browser lighthouse audit but talk to your developers see what they can you know open up for you and then run with it yeah i've become a huge fan of webpagetest.org not only because of all the tests you can do but because of the videos they have like the videos you know largest contentful paints and everything else it's amazing because it's great it really helps with visualizing what the issue is yeah at the end of the day like sometimes just sending over like a lighthouse report is not going to do it right especially to see where you got to get that influence yeah sending over a video heck yeah all day and to your point the server that's in uh the production server may be a little bit slower right that's being tested on and stuff like that before it goes live but another thing is even if the server is the same sometimes a lot of the bells and whistles that can slow down the site such as customer review apps uh email apps like like like clavio like or clavio that's so slow like it really really slows down the loading of this thing google google apps google ads add pixels javascript a lot of those bells and whistles are added at the last minute right so the ability to be able to run that performance test when all of that is added is fantastic because if you're running it beforehand you're like oh yeah this is great this site's gonna be like 80 in lighthouse fastest site ever i've ever worked on and all those additional layers are added to it sometimes unneeded layers are added to it and suddenly you're down in the 30s again right so just really trying to forecast all of the additional bells and whistles which may be added to a chat right the little chat i know that no one uses most interesting questions sometimes i ask my clients is like hey is this chat this little chat icon actually result in sales at the end of the day and like no one can really answer that right like yeah people use it sometimes just that i like testing that out to see what the use is um really cool so uh any expectations when doing a migration in terms of traffic loss and if there is any traffic or ranking loss how long do you typically see there being a recovery in google yeah so for traffic loss what i expect to see every migration is about at least 10 and i consider that that a perfect migration like everything's good we you know all the redirects happen there are no javascript issues no rendering like everything is perfect we still see like a 10 traffic loss when it's something like that we see a recovery in about let's say two months average sometimes it's a little bit sooner but that seems to be when we've watched it about the time and it comes back and everything's great so you have to be prepared at least for that so we call that like hey everything's perfect and it'll come back don't worry about it then when you start to see some issues where not everything gets fixed that you know it's called out i'd say it goes up to like you know you're at the 10 that well that's like 15 to 20 traffic loss like that's that's not good but there's issues that we've said like hey we give like four months because we got to fix those issues and we know that development is probably their developers are working on other things right they have other priorities so that's what we've typically seen and a lot of that again does come down to the fact that we're working on somebody else's timetable right and so four months seems to be the average some of the worst cases though that i've seen are where i've i've seen up to like 40 percent i think once in a while we've seen 50 and i mean there's horror stories out there you can see we're way more and in that case what's happened nearly every time i've seen it happen it has been a just there's been a catastrophe right rendering wasn't handled it was called out developers didn't do it or there was no time and c-suite was like well we got a launch um no redirects like i said you've you've probably seen that right they just didn't redirect it yeah i've seen 100 i've seen 100 loss because of that that that dastardly robots no index tag left in the code when someone pushes live right yeah you get that email oh what happened what's going on with our seo yep did we not pay you it's like you know and on that that we've we've seen that actually happen where a javascript uh javascript was adding in a no index tag it called it out told the developers like five times and i think it took them like a month to fix it but you know we we had said and thankfully of that it was on like some weird pages so it didn't affect everything but still that hurts so okay it can take some time and at the end of the day i think what really matters is how quick you can respond to it if you can respond quickly that time is likely going to go down but if you've done like we changed out all of our content and it's completely new like unless you change things like back to how they were it just might not recover i have seen some stuff where it's permanent like almost 50 percent lost pretty much feels like just some sites i know went through something i watch and it's like they never fixed it it's been a year problem's still there like you're not gonna it's not gonna come back magically i think another another tip too is that like there's always a countdown to launch day and then once that gets launched everyone then like takes off because they've been working so hard but you can't do that right so you have to have like launch day but then try to try to keep like the developers on hand and like a certain percentage of their time around for about a week or two right because there's going to be certain changes that you notice post-launch that are really difficult to identify beforehand right so if everyone's like going up and like oh we're going to launch this thing on like october 15th and then like october 16th they're like see i took the day off i've been working so hard preparing for this migration like what like what how do i get this changed how do i fix this so that's that's a good tip from my experience working on these as well um one question that comes up quite a bit is hey i've i've migrated from one domain to another domain right and you know what i haven't really lost that much traffic but when i search google for a site-specific search for my old url site colon old url i get all of these results what's happening there how come the old domain is still indexed in google yeah so i got two answers for that one one if you're doing a brand change i've seen brands stay in even ranking not even just the site index for over a year and that's because in my mind well the customer's looking for the old brand google knows that the transition happened because other you know urls have swapped over but they want to meet that you know that query right they want that user to get what they want so the user's shown the old url they jump in very common with brand urls from what i've seen so in that case you can't really change anything but that does explain why and it's actually a benefit for the user but with the site index you have to keep in mind that when you run a search with a site index that doesn't mean that everything you see there is actually surfaced as a ranking like that old url may show up there but if you search for likes different terms it doesn't mean it's going to pop up it's an issue i actually like say it's a question that comes up a lot i do see it in different areas like hey like i did this like this old url i thought i removed it but it's still in the site search why is that it's like well it's not actually getting traffic like google grabs everything right you'll see stuff that's ancient that's why the results are always like it's a million results for like a big site but there's way more urls than that you can't fully trust it so i view that as like hey it's like google's master list right it's everything it's seen um they have it they can surface it if they want but it doesn't mean that they will surface it so you really have to keep that in mind because if you do that i mean you'll go years and you'll run it's like it's still there it's like yeah it's it's still going to be there i mean i've i've seen that it's going to show up right yeah like you're going to find it google's going to give it to you but it doesn't mean that a user who you know looks up like brand term necessarily is going to get that or your you know your general term it that doesn't mean it's actually going to surface besides like things like no index lingering around or maybe some like content you weren't aware of what error or lack of redirects what are some other like commonly overlooked parts of a migration or mistakes that you typically see pop up after the fact that people can identify early on and maybe save some of that traffic going through this process yeah uh canonicals braking is probably one of the bigger ones um like i said sometimes it's it's an old staging url i don't see that one too often but does come up sometimes you'll see you know relative canonicals rather rather than absolute uh stuff like that you should catch in in staging but sometimes it happens one thing i do see though and it's a pain is scripts being that are not live on the staging environment like you talked about those bells and whistles they're not live on staging but they go live after the site is moved to production and then you'll see something like a script closing the head early and then the canonical tags out there floating in the wind and nothing's going on google's not grabbing it uh we see that usually like some of the other things trying to think here that i see that are happening sometimes internal links never got updated to the new links on occasion some old staging links are out are floating as internal links so you gotta look at that it's uh it's a pain but otherwise i mean i i do see like random things pop up right it's it's weird like you'll see like we have a cookie consent form that came up and just somehow like broke things and causes a loop once if you access a url like weird things like that happen but i always look for beyond like said robots and no indexes and stuff like that it's usually stuff around maybe a broken redirect canonical tag issues and then the other big one is usually as much as i call it out images don't always get um solved in the once the site is moved over and so you've got a you know hey on a speed perspective you got to fix that and then the other thing too does come up a lot of people forget about their images when they do migrations either they you know if you have image traffic it's more important to you so you got to keep that in mind but sometimes they don't redirect the images you know if you're on a cdn it doesn't matter as much but if that's something that's important to you uh it's something that you should be thinking about you know did i transfer those did i redirect those did i keep them sometimes you'll find old blog articles where they just something didn't get updated and all the images are broken um yeah not too common but if you're an image-heavy site then you want to pay special attention to that one thing i've definitely seen slow down domain to new domain migrations is when images and then other assets in the code are still referencing storage location on the old domain right so maybe like it said old like hey this is our cms but here's our ftp or here's whatever we're hosting over here so like maybe it's a script maybe it's a css reference maybe it's an image file whatever and i've seen that slowing down so many times like it's it's it's almost like it's like a mixed signal it's like when it's like when you uh it's like when you no index uh wordpress page and yoast but it doesn't update the sitemap so it's still in the xml sitemap right so like you're telling google hey don't index it hey index it because it's in the sitemap don't index it index it so then you get that error right within search console like what happened how come it didn't automatically be taken on the site map so it's like sometimes that connection of the dots doesn't always happen and it's worth going through but it really sounds to me at the end of the day the more you can crawl the more you can get closer to what the site is going to look like in a live environment and the more you can run more tools that are simply on your like the more you can get i mean we're all talking about lab data at the end of the day right it isn't until you go live you're really going to get that field data you know so but the more you can do that the more you can mitigate risk when it comes to making that migration and just continuously one thing i've also found is that a developer may fix x but then like even in a new site build it could be a little bit of whackable like maybe they they fixed this but then they rolled something else back as part of that fix and something that they addressed a while back is reoccurring again you know so just the ability to constantly constantly crawl uh before before we kind of uh get into the end of the show is there anything else that you you feel like on a site migration people should really look into um or any any any golden tips or nuggets of information you can drop for listeners and viewers today yeah i think that one of the biggest things the great thing is it doesn't just stick with uh migrations right when you're doing that migration you're gonna probably find a lot of technical issues and what we often find say nine times out ten there's not enough time to fix all of them so what we like to do what i do is here's all my issues i prioritize them you know high medium low and you go in with the expectation that not all this is going to be fixed and if you're on an agency or like tool like side like i am um you don't have exact access to developers but your client does or if you're in-house then you do and you really have to keep in mind like those developers are working on the migration in ways that you're not like server configuration i don't touch it you know um changing all the code doing all these things in the back end we as seos typically aren't doing that but developers are engineers they're all handling that so what i would say for to make sure everything goes well in the migration side prioritize your issues in terms of what can go wrong and if it goes wrong how bad is it is this a high impact is this something like javascript rendering there's no render rendering active we have to rely on google to get it right and while they do a good job now that doesn't mean it's a great job so that's an issue that you got to prioritize um as opposed to like my meta descriptions are 320 characters like i i don't care about that at this point so build a good strong relationship with developers and then know that they have other things that they're working on and those issues that you find provide them to the developers and tell them look here's ten issues i need these four fixed before we launch uh you know i know you guys have stuff that you're dealing with want to be respectful of your time if we don't fix these here's what's going to happen because at the end of the day they're the ones doing the heavy lifting right so you got to be aware of what's going on with them if you build that good relationship for one your critical issues are going to get solved and you're not going to launch with them you know you're going to be as close to perfection as you can be on launch day two you build a good relationship so in the future when you come to them of like hey can we make these changes they're more willing to make those changes because i would say for me like if i'm going to break down migrations like 50 of it is finding issues you know technical side it's like hey we've got javascript issues we've got page speed issues we've got broken canonical tags we've got content issues that are happening but the other fifty percent of that is knowing that you have a team that's gotta fix those and you gotta work well with them so i do think it's one of the areas that i see a lot of struggle in and if i you know when i work i try to bridge the gap i'll talk with developers yeah at any time and that comes from just in-house experience of not getting along with developers um so making it a point that you know have a a friendship so to speak a good partnership um that's something to keep in mind you know migrations at the end of the day look you've got issues we've got technical problems there's things that are happening but there's a human element with other people that you really got to think about and that can be the difference between the critical issue being solved and your migration going well or you launching and finding out that hey all the stuff i reported never got fixed and now i've got a scramble so i would say that yeah that's a good point on like two hits like one if you're doing an seo audit as well you always want to prioritize right what can be fixed now what's the most important thing to be fixed with the upcoming development releases and what's going to move the needle right so from a migration to be the ability to prioritize and say okay maybe these other things we can do after the migration right or maybe i can log in and do some of this or maybe somebody else can but you guys focus you all focus on this because this is the most important thing and if it's not done it's going to be it's not going to look well for any of the teams involved right so really really good tips cody where can we find you online yeah so actually one thing i was going to do before i did this and i didn't get to it was i'll put a site on my linkedin i own my name so the.org there's a dot-com story there that's very sad but uh for right now i'm just on linkedin i don't really do any social media that much but you can ask questions there i've gotten questions and i'll answer them and then later on i'll put a site up on there so that people can see where i'm at if they have questions but yeah feel i mean feel free to send something there i'll answer it um and you know throw it if you got interesting questions i'm happy to hear them if i don't know it then hey gives me something to learn you know it's true that's true well thanks so much for jumping on today really appreciate it especially on this friday afternoon you're on the east coast right i'm on the west coast actually i used to be in where are you i'm in oregon so i'm over here on the on the west coast where you don't go to the beach you go to the coast yeah exactly because there's just a bunch of rocks it's rocks and it's cold nobody goes where in oregon are you i'm around the portland area so just in that whole metro um yeah okay nice probably very pretty up there this time of year yeah it is i mean i can look outside everything's green um it's very nice and like an hour and a half from the beach so yeah that's right that's wonderful when it's not all on true that's true fire um all right well thanks so much for jumping on today i mean really it was great to be able to address a lot of these questions that came up on the last webinar that we had with conductor with your cell phone conductor on uh site migrations and just really appreciate you jumping on today to talk a little bit more about cyber migrations and clearing up a lot of these questions so yeah it's really good again thank you to our sponsors ahrefs and adzuma for making today's show possible and thank you to uh conductor for letting cody jump on and talk a little bit more about his role inside of the company working on migrations and it sounds like you're doing quite a lot of them if this is what you're focusing on what percent of the time are you focusing on site migrations right um i'd say like 75 to 80 of my time is site migrations with the other 20 just being kind of support for the other members here of technical questions that come up um you know we've got sometimes it gets a little lower on the migration sometimes it gets a little bit higher but um yeah it's it's like 80 migrations i've done a lot amazing amazing so any of you that have questions about migrations go to linkedin look up cody galt and you'll find him ask questions he's always here and my understanding is like you you were even helping some of the uh some of the viewers from the old webinar uh with a little bit of their migration questions after the fact so it's always great to find someone that's carved out their own little slice of the industry and become a specialist and you are a site migration specialist and i'll tell you cody like we said there's so many seems like there's so many companies right now that are changing platforms changing urls changing brands mergers and acquisitions etc etc it sounds like you're going to be a busy bee yep all right all right well thanks again cody thank you to all of you that uh tuned in today and thanks a lot to our sponsors again this has been a great episode of the search engine journal show and everybody have a great weekend thank you for joining us this week on the search engine journal show if you liked this episode subscribe to our channel for so much more and click the notification bell so you don't miss a thing [Music]