Presentation for Searchmetrics London Summit 2018. You can read more about it on my website: http://victoriaolsina.com/managing-website-migration-the-complexity-of-implementing-change-within-a-big-organisation

1. Managing Website Migration:
The complexity of implementing change
within a big organisation
9th May 2018
Victoria Olsina, Search & Acquisition Manager
#SearchmetricsSummit

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If I hear another another website migration
presentation at an SEO conference…
I know what you are thinking:

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What I have learned from migrating one the biggest
websites in the UK?
1. SEO is easy, working with other teams is not.
2. A website migration is more about business cases,
stakeholders management, processes, risk mitigation
procedures and presenting results, than SEO.
3. Is not about WHAT we implement in terms of SEO but
HOW we manage to get buy-in to do it.

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Agenda
1. Presentation
2. Project’s background
3. Lessons learned
A. The Pitch / Business Case
B. The process is everything
C.Risk management
D.Presenting Results
4. Take aways

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Presentation

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Hello, I’m Victoria
• Search & Acquisition Manager at Barclays.
• 9 years experience in Search & Online Marketing .
• Google Adwords, Analytics Certified, Magento Solutions
Specialist
• Markets: UK, Australia, New Zealand and Argentina.
• Convinced parents to get an internet connection in 1997.

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Project’s background

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About Barclays:
1. Founded in 1690, Barclays is a major global
financial services provider.
2. 2nd largest bank in UK and 15th largest in the
world in terms of total assets.
3. 22 million retail customers, and almost one
million business banking clients.
4. 140,000 employees worldwide.

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Reasons why the website migration was vital to Barclays:
• Cost savings from platform consolidation – from
many websites to one.
• Consistency of content and design - all sites will use
Barclays Design Language.
• Use of cloud computing to allow us to execute at
scale.
• Market-leading CMS software - making it quicker and
easier to author content.

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HTTPS
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Reasons why the website migration was vital to Barclays:
• Integration with other marketing products: analytics
and targeting .
• Responsive/adaptive websites by default with
standard patterns for cookies/accessibility/etc.
• Https by default - Google was going to soon start
disliking http sites.
It means our customers can quickly and easily find what they
want online

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The SEO team’s role in the website migration:
1. To transfer SEO equity from the legacy site to the
new site (avoiding a drop in rankings & traffic).
2. We also used it as an opportunity to better
optimise the website.

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Challenges, Risks & Opportunities

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Challenge: A complex type of migration
• Redesign
• New architecture
• New domain (moving subdomains to subfolders)
• HTTP >> HTTPS
Also, combinations of the above, for example:
1. Redesign only
2. Redesign & new architecture
3. Redesign, new architecture & new domain
4. HTTP >> HTTPS only
Barclays
Migration

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Site Migration: Risks
• Site Migrations can have a massive negative impact on commercial performance.
• Success is predominantly determined by the transfer of SEO equity (301
redirects)
• Applianceonline.co.uk rebranded as AO in Q3 2013 migrating to a new domain. It
took them more than 2 years (Oct-16) to recover.

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Multiple opportunities:
Taxonomy &
Structure:
Technical
Optimisation:
Content
Optimisation
• Keyword targeting
in URLs (clean
URLs)
• Indexation issues • Often when a new site is
being developed,
content is rewritten.
• Grouping related
topics (as this will
influence URL path)
• Page speed • Pages should target
specific keywords and
themes.
• Navigation links • Mobile optimisation • Keyword cannibalisation
• Breadcrumbs • Identify which pages
shouldn’t be migrated
• Content duplication

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Lessons learned

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If you want a website migration that aligns with
SEO best practices…

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1. The Pitch / Business case

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The innocent assumption that you don’t need a pitch
when working in-house for multi billion business.
Expectation Reality

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Do we need a pitch when working in house?
1. Business case detailing risks and
opportunities in terms on revenue.
2. Internal stakeholders: How can we help
you reach your target (what’s in for you)?

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The sad truth:
So let’s talk to the stakeholders about metrics they care about:
• Traffic
• Conversions
• Revenue
And build a business case around them to get the other teams on board.
For example: SEO optimisation for website migration, a £XM opportunity.
Nobody cares about Google but you.

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2. The process is everything

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Process considerations: Project definitions
• Communicate SEO requirements for CMS and wireframes.
• Many small releases vs one big release.

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Process considerations: Participation
• Take the lead - be involved every meeting as early as
possible.
• Attend daily, weekly updates/stand-ups

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Process considerations: Workflows
• Who is in charge of what.
• Who has the power to make
a fix happen immediately?
• Why and how to escalate.
Project Owners
Supreme
leader
Stakeholders

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Process considerations: Workflows
• Why to escalate, for example:

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Process considerations: Workflows
• What’s the process flow - who has to sign off.
• Where in the process does the SEO team sit? Who approves
the copy?
Copyteam
Production
SEO Process

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Process considerations: Managing fails
• CTRL + Z: when to roll back.
• Reviews: crawls of each section and previous sections.
A. Remove redirects
B. Prevent new domain
from being indexed
C. Repoint domain to
legacy server
D. Resubmit old sitemap
to Webmaster Tools
E. Crawl legacy site
Plan B
New section
Old section
Old section
Old section

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Process considerations: Documentation
• One source of truth: use a central system such as
Confluence for version control and date releases.
• Document everything and save it on the central system
which has to be accessible to everyone involved.
Project Owners
Supreme
leader
Stakeholder

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3. Risk management

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Risk Management: Training
• Have an internal training session to explain basic SEO to other
teams:
• Keywords
• Metadata
• Redirects
• Canonicals
• Sitemaps
• What happens if the wrong pages are indexed over the
weekend?
`

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Risk Management: Planning
• Have all pages, copy, metadata and redirects, defined and
approved and sign-off before hand.
• Be aware of Legal & Compliance approval timings.

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Risk Management: Fixes
• What didn’t break in the staging website could break on live. Re-
test extensively with automated testing.
• Define a correction window that leaves time enough for testing
and amendments. BAU shouldn’t be used for this.
• Consider a post migration window for mop-ups and assign
resources accordingly.
+48hr

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Risk Management: Timings
• Launch when traffic is lower. Plan resources accordingly.
• Don’t launch of Thursday nor Friday. If there are errors, pages
will get indexed over the weekend.
• If a release gets delayed, update documents.

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`
• Keep track of release dates and add notes on the web
analytics platform.

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4. Presenting Results

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Presenting results:
• Organise meeting with stakeholders, product owners
and Supreme Leader to show results from migration.
• Distribute presentation, highlighting summary of results
for each stakeholder/business unit.
• Good results are useful to embed SEO practices across
the organisation.
• If other teams weren’t trying to engage with SEO
before, they will now.

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Website migration - Organic Search Performance Summary:
• Commercial traffic increase: 20.7% in spite of a -1.53%
decrease in demand.
• Conversions increase: 11.3% in spite of a -1.53% decrease in
demand.
• Help section (sub domain to folder) traffic increase: 47.3%
• HTTP to HTTPS increase: 11.5% in spite of only a 1%
increase in demand.
We turned the threat posed by the migration into an
opportunity, achieving significant growth.

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Results: Website migration: Commercial traffic increase 20.7%
20.7% Traffic increase, in spite of a -1.53% decrease in demand.
Traffic before and after Website migration
0
25,000
50,000
75,000
100,000
Current accounts Mortgages Loans Home Insurance Credit Cards Savings Business
Traffic 2 weeks pre migration Traffic 2 weeks post migration

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Results: Website migration: Conversions increase 11.3%
Average 11.3% increase in Conversions, in spite of a -1.53% decrease in
demand.
Conversions before and after Website migration
0
400
800
1,200
1,600
Current accounts Mortgages Loans Home Insurance Credit Cards Savings
Conversions 2 weeks pre migration Conversions 2 weeks post migration

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Help Section: Subdomain to Directory +47%
47% increase in organic traffic from migrating HELP from:
“help.barclays.co.uk” to “www.barclays.co.uk/help/”

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HTTP to HTTPS +11.5% traffic
11.5% Traffic increase 2 weeks after HTTPS migration, in spite only 1% increase demand.
Traffic before and after HTTPS migration
0
35,000
70,000
105,000
140,000
Current accounts Mortgages Loans Home Insurance Credit Cards Savings Business
Traffic 2 weeks pre HTTPS Traffic 2 weeks post HTTPS

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Case Study: Current Accounts – Massive increase in
Organic Traffic & Conversions
• Current accounts visibility and
clicks increased significantly since
migration (+100% YoY on a
weekly basis)
• 100% increase in current account
conversions driven by organic
search.
• Driven by top positions for generic
terms such as “bank accounts”
and “overdrafts”.

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SEO

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4. Take-aways

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Take-aways
1.Plan ahead and define as many variables (and have the
approvals) as possible beforehand.
2.Build a business case that talks about the metrics
stakeholders care about.
3.You know about already know SEO best practices, so
focus on the process and risk mitigation.
4.Have a roll back plan if things don’t go as expected.
5.Present results back to the organisation.

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Thank you.
Im not on Twitter, but I’m on:
• linkedin.com/in/victoriaolsina/
• victoriaolsina.com
You can download my presentation here:
http://bit.ly/managing-migration