Get your tech right for you and your business

Emma says: “Make sure that you’re using the right tech for you and your business.

If you’re migrating, make sure that you’re getting it right.”

What are the key types of migration nowadays?

“There are a few. You have your classic domain name migration, where your domain name moves from one to another, and that can be for a number of different reasons. It can be a branding decision, for example.

A number of years ago, there was the cheeky edition of an ‘S’ next to HTTP, which is an extra layer of security. That’s technically a domain migration because you’re moving from one to the other, so adding that extra layer of security meant a lot of migrations.

You have your platform migrations, which is where you’re changing your tech – for example, moving from Salesforce to something headless or moving from WordPress to Shopify. It can also be a hosting migration, which sometimes happens at the same time as a platform migration. Something like Squarespace comes with the hosting provided so, if you want to change your tech, you also have to change your hosting. That can be going from Squarespace or GoDaddy to 20i or AWS.

Then you have redesigns, which SEOs would call a migration because so many things can happen during redesign. You might end up losing all of the nice titles that you’ve added, the structure of your content might change, or your site architecture might change. Any kind of mass change across a website, we would typically call that a migration.

Sometimes you will have unsupervised accidental migrations. I recently came across one where all of the product URLs changed because something went wrong with the feed. That’s a URL migration because all of the product URLs have changed, and that one was unsupervised so there was a lot of cleanup for that.

Those are the typical migrations that you come across, although I would probably classify a migration as any kind of mass change across the site.”

Should every site be using HTTPS, even if you’re not selling anything on your site?

“I would definitely use HTTPS, yes. Even if you’re not selling something, you might have a form or something like that. It’s just best practice now.

With a lot of different platforms, you get it for free. If you’re starting out, then just set it up right from the start. If you’re migrating, there’s no better time to go for it than now.”

You’re going to share the top 5 things to do when migrating your site. Number 1: Understand if it’s an opportunity for growth.

“When a company does a huge migration, this could be your time to shine. Maybe you’ve got a load of things in your tech roadmap that haven’t been actioned for a really long time, and you’ve been nagging those project managers, but you just cannot get them through. This might be your opportunity.

Understand what you can actually achieve. If you are doing a platform migration, what can you achieve in that new platform? Then, explain your requirements to make the most of it. Ideally, you would have been part of the decision, or you would have already said exactly what you needed from a new platform so that you could help with the decision-making around the tech that you will eventually be using.

The old saying was that you never get fired for bringing in IBM, and now it’s Salesforce. You never get fired for bringing in Salesforce. Luckily, Salesforce is pretty configurable. It’s not amazing at everything. Like any platform, there’s always an issue, but that’s okay. There are lots of other requirements in there and, as long as it’s configurable, then you can change it to get what you want out of it.

First, see if you can help with the decision-making. If that decision has already been made, see if this is the opportunity for you to get all of your requirements in so that you can grow and create a really solid technical foundation on that new platform.”

Number 2: Benchmark what you have now.

“If you’re getting any traffic to the site now, it’s always good to know whether it is brand or generic. Something got you to this point where you are getting that amount of traffic into the site. If it’s all branded, then it was likely branding exercises that have brought in the traffic that you have now.

However, if you have a pretty strong generic and brand split – you’re ranking for a lot of decent generic terms and bringing in a nice amount of generic traffic – something about your site got you to that point. It won’t be an accident. There will be a reason for it and, typically, it is down to good SEO. You need to list what is good about the site now because there will be a reason why you get the level of traffic that you have.

Then, part of that benchmarking exercise is communicating to people what you currently have that is really good and is leading to this traffic. Preferably, you can also link that to some kind of business objective like leads or sales. If it’s e-commerce, get in those revenue figures and link that to what is working so well.”

Number 3: List all of your requirements.

“Once you’ve identified what is good, you need to make sure that you’re keeping it. That should be the first thing in your requirements. If you’ve got really great content on your site, your first requirement should be to not lose that content.

As part of redesigns or platform migrations, sometimes it is decided that a piece of content might not be serving you from a brand perspective or it might not be getting any paid traffic – or somebody might just not like that content anymore. If you show what that piece is actually doing for the company – the traffic it’s bringing in, the conversions, and the revenue – you can explain that you need to keep it, unless they are happy to sign off that loss.

This is particularly useful if you are agency-side because you will be held to account if you lose any amount of traffic. If you make errors like that, then you will lose the account. You need to look after your clients, and you need to make sure that they know when something will be lost and the impact of it. Make it their decision to accept that loss.

Get a list of all of your requirements for what is currently making you so good. Then, consider whether this is a chance to grow or just maintain what you have. If you just want to maintain what you have now, that list might be enough – as long as you’re also factoring in everything that you need to make sure that Google catches up to the journey you’ve just made. If it’s a domain name migration, you will need redirects, so factor that in.

If there is a chance to grow off the back of it, then make sure to get all of your requirements in that will help you grow, and make sure that you’ve got buy-in. For the tasks you need to do, explain what opportunities you want to go after, and how you get there.

There are three batches of requirements. First, what has made you as good as you are? Keep that. Second, make sure Google is going on the journey with you. Third, can you actually grow off the back of this as well?”

Number 4: Make friends with the dev.

“They’re the ones doing the task, so you absolutely need to make friends with them. One of the best working relationships I’ve ever had was with a developer who sat opposite me. If he was ever doing anything where he had to make a decision, he would say, ‘Do you think Google has a preference between these options?’ By sitting so close and having that relationship, I could feed in on everyday tasks that he was working on – and the SEO went really well.

Make friends with your devs. If you can, sit near them. I work remotely so I’m always hitting them up on Slack. Try to get in there as much as possible. You will want to be testing on lower environments as you go; you don’t want to leave it until you go live. Get in there, and know what’s being done. Know when your requirements are being worked on and then make them a cup of tea.”

Number 5: Test, test, test.

“You never know the surprises that you’re going to get when something goes live. Ideally, nothing is a surprise. Realistically, that never happens.

There’s always a surprise. Maybe something hasn’t migrated across, or a subset of URLs hasn’t redirected properly. You absolutely need to test, test, test. I previously worked with a big US department store and, when they went live, all of their canonicals were pointing to staging. Within 5 minutes of going live, every single URL that they were ranking for was to their staging site. Luckily, the fix for that was rolled out pretty quickly, but that’s the kind of surprise that you can be dealing with.

Get your ducks in a line. I personally end up with two testing documents – outside of staging, just for live. One will look at your major requirements. If something is wrong with the testing on this list, you will tell people immediately. That is the high-priority stuff: rank or not rank, get traffic or not get traffic. Everybody knows that, if something is wrong with this list, they’ll be informed within 5/10 minutes, and they will need to action it immediately.

Then I have my other testing list, which is much less urgent. It’s the things that you want to have. For example, you want to make sure that your titles are all correct, but it’s not make or break. It doesn’t have to be fixed within 5 minutes. With that testing doc, you’ll nudge people if something is urgent but, otherwise, they’ll hear about everything at the end and then you can work through them.

That primes people so they know that, if you come back with something urgent, they need to work on it. It is not good, and they need to fix it.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“If anybody out there uses Loom, it’s this screen recording software that lets you record what you’re doing on your computer and record yourself speaking at the same time. When you’re finished recording it’ll say, ‘Congratulations, you’ve saved 5 minutes of time!’

Use tech like that. Be aware of the time that you have. Using Loom can save a lot of time that would be spent in meetings. We’ve all had those days where you are in meetings or calls until 5 PM and then you realise you haven’t managed to get anything else done. Save as much time as you can by not being in as many meetings and always make sure you have an agenda. It’s an oldie but a goodie.”

Emma Russell is Founder at Oxford Comma Digital, and you can find her over at Oxford-Comma.digital.