It was 21st July when Raj (Founder of Inbound Mantra) called me and Rashmi (my colleague) on a Google Hangout call. We had no idea about the agenda of the call. When we joined the call I somewhere noticed that Raj was looking quite a bit excited.
After a minute of silence, he said guys, ManagerPlus and Hippo CMMS are going to migrate.
I asked, where?
He replied, on their parent company’s domain, Iofficecorp.com.
He said after some months managerplus.com will become managerplus.iofficecorp.com and hippocmms.com will become hippocmms.iofficecorp.com
He continued by saying that our job is to plan the migration successfully because it will affect the SEO of both of the websites and we can see some downfall in rankings.
ManagerPlus will migrate first, the date is 31 August 2020, and then Hippo CMMS will migrate, the date of migration for Hippo CMMS is not specified because firstly its website will get re-designed, and then the IofficeCorp team will take the decision.
I was so excited because it was the first time I would work on the migration of 2 big domains. But at the same time, little concern about the downfall of the rankings.
Raj gave us 2 tasks after that. One was to put down all the questions related to the migration of both of the domains and the second was to gather information about doing the migration successfully.
Questions we had in our mind related to Migration
After brainstorming, Rashmi and I both came up with these questions:
Q.1 The title, meta, alt tags will be removed from the pages?
Q.2 Will the redirection loop between URLs remain the same or get erased after migration?
Q.3 What will happen with the tracking codes for e.g. Google Analytics, will those codes be still in the website or do we have to add those codes again after migration?
Q.4 Will the migration show an effect on the site speed?
Q.5 How will the sitemap – will the sitemap of Hippo CMMS and ManagerPlus come under IofficeCorp’s sitemap or will each subdomain sitemap be in their respective folders?
Q.6 Will there be any Implications on the crawl budget?
Some questions were answered by Raj and some from the KUNO team (Team who were doing the migration of both of the brands), Here are those answers:
Q.1 The title, meta, alt tags will be removed from the pages?
KUNO – “No, title and meta will remain the same. But for Hippo CMMS, we will design a new website and then migrate. The new design will lead to the removal of old images and the addition of new images. So you have to add alt tags for those new images”.
Q.2 Will the redirection loop between URLs remain the same or get erased after migration?
KUNO – “Yes, it will remain the same”.
Q.3 What will happen with the tracking codes for e.g. Google Analytics, will those codes be still on the website or do we have to add those codes again after migration?
KUNO – “Yes, those codes will be in the new domain”.
Q.4 Will the migration show an effect on the site speed?
KUNO – “This could create an effect on the site speed, especially with Hippo CMMS because of the change in design”.
Q.5 How will be the sitemap – will the sitemap of Hippo CMMS and ManagerPlus come under IofficeCorp’s sitemap or will each subdomain sitemap be in their respective folders?
KUNO – “The idea is to keep the sitemap separate for each brand, but do you want to keep them in one?” After discussing internally we recommended keeping them separate because it was good for the crawl budget.
Q.6 Will there be any Implications on the crawl budget?
Raj – “There is not any concrete answer for this, according to me, implications on crawl budget can happen”.
After this, we had got the answers to our questions. And now it was the time to scrape the internet for the information of a successful migration.
Information we gathered for a successful migration
After reading some migration-related articles on sites like HubSpot, Search Engine Land, Host Papa and Serpact, we created a checklist of action points and divided those into two parts: Pre-migration tasks checklist and Post-migration tasks checklist.
Pre-migration tasks checklist
Here are the tasks we had to do prior to migration:
- Creating a list of all URLs so that, after migration, we can ensure that each page is going to its correct redirected URL, not on 404.
- Doing SEO Audit and fixing issues to make the technical SEO part of the website more healthy and for that, we used 2 tools, Ahrefs and SEMrush
- Creating a list of those sites and authors who had given backlinks to the website of ManagerPlus and Hippo CMMS, the idea was to send them a heads up email about the change in URL of each brand so that they can update the URLs of these brands in their website after migration.
- Creating a list of pages that have canonical URLs pointing to their main page. Because after migration we had to put the canonical tag back on these pages.
- Collecting current performance data for benchmarking, meaning, we wanted to collect data on things like:
- Speed of the webpages.
- Google rankings of our Hero keyword pages.
- Pages that were appearing on featured snippets and more.
The idea was that if after migration we would lose anything (like rankings on Google) then this data would be helpful for benchmarking.
Now let’s move to the post-migration checklist.
Post-migration Checklist
Post-migration checklist is further divided into 3 parts:
- Tasks to do on the same day after migration.
- Tasks to do next day of the migration
- Propelled tasks after migration.
Here are the tasks for each part:
Tasks to do on the day after migration.
- Creating a new property in Google Analytics.
- Creating a new property in Google Search Console and referring the Old domain property to the new domain property using the “Change of Address‘ tool via settings in Search Console. It gives a major signal to Google about the domain move.
- After creating a new property in the Google search console, the next thing that we had to do is to request indexing via the URL Inspection tool for hero keyword pages to make sure they’re indexed as quickly as possible.
- Submitting sitemap of the new domain in Google search console.
- Updating Robots.txt file to make sure that un-important pages will not get indexed.
- Checking the third-party tracking codes like Google ads, Facebook ads, Linkedin ads, etc. to make sure the tracking of new domain is happening correctly.
Tasks to do next day of migration
- After Migration, we had to ensure that each URL is going to its correct redirected URL. (Remember 1st point in the pre-migration checklist).
- We had to send an email to the website owners and the authors which had given the backlinks to ManagerPlus and Hippo CMMS to notify them to change the URL in their webpage. (Remember 3rd point in the pre-migration checklist).
- Conducting an SEO audit to solve the technical SEO issues that will occur after migration.
Propelled tasks
- Checking and applying our [downloadable file of checklist] On-page SEO checklist [downloadable file of checklist] on all Hero keyword pages to make sure that they are perfectly optimized for SEO.
- Updating the new domain URLs in the internal links, Although the old domain URLs would redirect to new domain URLs but we knew that with each redirection the link juice flow will decrease, so we decided to change old domain URLs in internal links to new domain URLs after migration.
- Increasing the activities to promote the website to give a positive signal to Google. Here are the things we had to do:
- Schedule social media posts for every page every hour (Especially on Twitter).
- Double the amount of blog post creation. Before migration, 4 blog posts in a month but after migration, 8 blog posts in a month.
- Driving traffic to the hero keyword pages from paid ads.
So we did all the tasks listed above for both of the brands.
And now it is time to talk about the performance of each domain after migration.
Results After Migration of ManagerPlus.
Migration of ManagerPlus happened on 31st August 2020 and Organic traffic in the first week of September went to ZERO.
Rankings of all Hero keywords like Equipment management software, Work order software and Preventive maintenance software, etc even dropped.
Results After Migration of Hippo CMMS
The migration for Hippo CMMS happened on 15th November 2020 but the results for Hippo CMMS were also disappointing.
In the first 15 days of November month (1st November to 15th November), Hippo CMMS generated 218 organic visitors on category traffic from the USA.
Which number went down to 22 in the next 15 days of November (16th November to 30th November).
And just like ManagerPlus, ranking of Hippo CMMS for its hero keywords fall down
Final Words
We anticipated that the results would not be pleasant, but according to my opinion, the loss in rankings is less compared to what we expected.
But now we are working to bring the rankings back. Hippo CMMS is showing positive results, however, ManagerPlus is stuck but we know ourselves that we will figure out a way. And soon I will update this blog with the positive results for both of the brands.
