Website Marketing & Migrations: The Ultimate Guide
At Extramile Digital, we understand the importance of gaining tangible, real-world results from your digital marketing channels for your business.
In this guide, we demystify the technical jargon and processes associated with marketing and developing a new website, exploring the world of website migrations.
What is a website migration?
Website migration (definition): The process of making large scale changes to an existing website, often involving specialist website development, design, and digital marketing skills to update a website’s functionality.
Website migrations offer the opportunity to modernise and refine your website around your audience’s needs. Whilst allowing you to stay up to date with the latest legal requirements, a new website can help to enhance your positioning in the market, deliver value to customers and incentivise sales serving as the home for your digital presence.
When do you need a website migration?
Used to reach different audiences and fulfil purposes, there are no universal rules dictating when a website migration is necessary. However, the following may be considered common reasons for migration projects:
- Domain changes – having a change of brand name or need a more relevant website domain? A Website migration can bring your website domain up-to-date with your company.
- Site Structure / User Experience – modernising and re-developing your website’s structure can improve your user’s experience and value from purposeful content, optimised for all devices.
- Content Management System (CMS) Changes – switching CMS (e.g. WordPress, Wix, Joomla) can help to best align your website’s function with your company’s operations.
- E-Commerce, Lead Generation or Hybrid? – Depending on your existing site and offering, migration services can support optimising your website functionality for your company’s revenue generation.
- New languages & localities – Multilingual website migrations can ensure effective reach in new markets, offering wider opportunities for your digital marketing.
- Re-marketing & Branding – Introducing new services or in need of a website overhaul? Website migrations enable you to launch your new website with fresh branding and services within the market.
So What is Involved?
The size and scope of website migration processes may vary depending on your objectives and intentions from your new website. Despite this, there are a number of core processes that must be undertaken to ensure a successful website launch. Join us as we explore these further:
- Company Research & Situational Analysis
- Selecting a CMS
- Site Structure, Keyword Research & Mapping
- Metadata & Off-Page SEO
- Redirects
- Backlink Audits
- Tracking Codes, Events & Conversion setup – GA4, GSC & GTM
- Data benchmarking
- Pre and post-live analysis
Situational Analysis:
Perhaps the most important process before the project initiates, a situational analysis can provide an integral understanding of your business’ objectives, market and current website performance.
- Company & Market Research – Exploring your market, industry competitors and search engine competitors can help to understand your level of competition and incite processes to support brand differentiation.
- Objective Setting – Quantitative or qualitative, objective and goal setting help to set clear aims for both your business and website. By ingraining these at the start of your project (e.g. a 10% increase in website traffic, 5% increase in sales, launch a new product line with a new landing page) this can help to ensure consistency across your brand’s marketing and operational efforts.
- Target Audience – Exploring and setting your target audience segments and buyer personas can help to shape the purpose of your new website. By placing your customers and primary audiences in mind, methods taken to maximise brand visibility and user experience may be prioritised to support your business.
- Current Website Performance/Health – By examining your current website, attributes such as the design, content, technical SEO and website analytics may be analysed. This may serve as a baseline to incite processes for improvement or refinement in line with your business objectives.
Overall, a situational analysis of your business can clearly communicate your objectives, direction and purpose to be considered throughout the development of your new website, ensuring consistency and cohesion with your business strategy.
Selecting a Content Management System:
Content Management Systems (CMS) provide intuitive, user-friendly platforms to upload, manage and create pages across your website. As such, they remove the hassle of manually coding changes, allowing for swift updates to your business offering information.
With a wide variety of solutions available, selecting the most appropriate CMS for your new website will depend on your business needs; accounting for over 45% of websites present online, WordPress remains a significant option for many businesses, though e-commerce CMS’ such as Shopify are continuing to rise in popularity.
At Extramile Digital, we can help support you with your selection of CMS, ensuring your choice of platform is tailored to your needs.
Common CMS Terminology:
- Themes – Refers to the appearance style of your website. CMS’ offer a range of theme templates which may be used and altered to suit your brand guidelines. Alternatively, our website design and development team offers custom theme development to differentiate your business in the market.
- Blocks – Refers to the components that can be added to your website to build pages. Ranging in form and function, blocks allow for the input of text and media to help to provide value and content to your customers. Many CMS’ offer intuitive structuring of webpages, allowing you to drag and drop blocks and content to update the appearance of your website.
- Plugins – Pieces of software that integrate with your CMS to enhance functionality. This may include metadata fields, e-commerce functionality, security enhancements.
Once a CMS and design has been confirmed, your content management system shall serve as a central hub for the development and management of your new website.
Sitemap & Page Structuring:
Sitemap (definition) – A complete structural representation of your website’s pages, displaying a visual representation of their relationship.
When developing a new website, a sitemap serves as a plan for the pages that you intend to retain or create. A new sitemap may be created for a number of different reasons:
- Improve User Journey – Updating your website’s pages and content can be beneficial to streamline and support your customers through their purchasing journeys. A review of your sitemap can ensure opportunities to develop awareness and interest in your offering, helping to guide your audience clearly throughout.
- New Offering/Services – A new website offers the opportunity to incorporate new website features, market new products/services and to target your audience’s needs. Analysing your current sitemap in line with your wider business objectives can support marketing and driving demand for your offering in the market.
- Target Different Audience Needs – Your target audience segments may have varying needs, requiring different content to support them. Rather than pushing all users to generic all-purpose pages, an updated sitemap can support in creating a structure of webpage content that supports each target audience’s needs through their personal journeys.
At Extramile Digital, our sitemap development processes combine website development expertise with specialist search engine optimisation know-how to support your brand awareness and customer discoverability. Our Digital Marketing team are expertly positioned to support your business needs and circumvent issues such as keyword cannibalisation before your site goes live.
Keyword Research & Mapping:
With a structured plan of your new website’s pages, search engine optimisation (SEO) processes can help to enhance your website marketing and digital presence to your target audiences. Our digital marketing processes ensure that your website not only appears professional, but supports your brand’s customer reach intentions.
Keywords (definition) – The terms, queries or questions input into search engines (such as Google) to return relevant results.
Keyword Research:
A method of market research, keyword research involves collecting and analysing keyword data, serving as an integral part of SEO and website marketing.
By cross referencing to your sitemap structure and business offering, our Digital Marketing team create valuable keyword lists for your business by assessing a range of crucial factors:
- Search Volume – The average number of searches for a keyword per month. This provides a quantitative insight into the volume of audience interest in the market, helping to support content alignment with your target customer search habits.
- Relevance – By understanding your audience and business offering, a list of keywords may be sought and collected that closely relate to your business to ensure relevance to your offering.
- Search Intent – This refers to the type of search behaviour alluded by a keyword (e.g. transactional intent “shoe shops near me” or informational intent “features of the latest iPhone”). Understanding the search intent of a keyword can help to align the type of content that is served.
- Competitor Gap Analysis – By exploring your competitor’s keywords, a gap analysis may provide insights to improve digital presence and positioning for your new website by examining untapped opportunities for your website.
Ultimately, keyword research offers significant potential to assess and align your website’s content with your target audience’s terminology and requirements.
Keyword Mapping:
Employing the developed sitemap, keyword mapping allocates priority keywords to specific pages, helping to support efforts to optimise and rank content based on the search topic. This process in turn supports the development of content and off-page SEO practices.
When creating new pages or updating page content, keyword research and mapping is important to ensure this is aligned with the intent of your target audience’s searches and aims to maximise the potential reach and relevance of the content provided.
Metadata & Off-Page SEO:
Put simply, metadata is additional information that helps to provide greater detail about the content and purpose of your webpages to search engines. This can support efforts to reach higher ranking positions in search engine results pages to your target audiences.
Metadata can take many forms, though a primary focus may be placed on:
- Page Titles – These appear when searching for web pages in search engines. Aligning your page titles with priority keywords may be advantageous to support clicks through to your content.
- Meta Descriptions – Appearing below page titles in search results, meta descriptions describe to search engines and audience’s what content they expect to discover when clicking on the page. Optimising this with priority keywords and incentives to click on the page can help to support brand visibility.
- Image Alt Tags – Often overlooked, alt tags describe what is contained in an image. Whilst supporting accessibility for visually impaired users, alt tags can help to support image search rankings providing an additional opportunity for brand visitors.
Metadata offers an opportunity to integrate keyword mapping processes further to support brand visibility strategies. Areas such as structured schema data and content optimisations may be explored through our range of digital marketing services.
Backlink Audit:
Backlinks (definition) – Links that direct users to your website from a website that is not owned by your business.
Backlinks can provide signals of trustworthiness to search engines. For example, consider a well known reputable site such as Wikipedia or BBC linking to your website. This may serve as a positive marker that your content or page is also reputable, helping to support higher rankings when users search for relevant keywords/search terms.
However, unethical, black hat SEO practices that attempt to manipulate search rankings may be commonly spotted within the industry; conversely, spam or toxic links can have the opposite effect and decrease trustworthiness to your website’s pages.
When undertaking a website migration, a backlink audit can help to analyse and address toxic backlinks that may harm your website’s reputability and ranking potential. By disavowing negatively affecting backlinks to your website this may help to undo such effects.
Backlink audits can equally equip you with the opportunity to expand relevant backlink potential; our digital PR services open up white-hat routes to increase brand discoverability and reach to your target audiences following your website migration.
Redirects:
Once your website pages have been created in alignment with your sitemap structure, an audit will need to be conducted to ensure pages that are being removed or having updated URL addresses are accounted for. Enter redirects:
Redirect (definition): The process of pointing traffic from an old URL towards a new URL of highest relevance.
A fundamental component of migrating websites, redirects ensure users reach the content aligned to their intended searches and website journeys. Redirects come in a variety of forms though the two fundamentals are:
- 301 (permanent) – Used when permanently redirecting an old page to a new page.
- 307 (temporary) – Used to temporarily redirect users to a page, this can be replaced once a permanent replacement page is established.
Our digital marketing specialists ensure crucial attention to detail, with advanced experience handling complex, multilingual website redirect projects. Redirects present significant importance to your website:
- Pass on Ranking Signals – When replacing old pages, redirects can pass on ranking signals to new pages, indicating that the new page offers equivalent value and information to users.
- Positive User Experience – A well strategised redirect profile can help to ensure a seamless user experience, preventing broken pages and redirect loops from negatively disrupting their web experiences.
- Mitigate 404 Page Exit Rates – 404 pages appear when a page is no longer found. They are a common roadblock to positive user experience. Redirects are crucial in website migrations to prevent users leaving your website when reaching unaccounted for 404 pages; generally, the greater the volume of changes made to your pages URLs, the greater the volume of redirects required.
Redirects offer the opportunity to make changes to your website’s domain name (e.g. extramiledigital.com) and manage multilingual variants of your pages to reach wider audiences depending on the scale and objectives of your business. For greater details and support, contact our friendly, knowledgeable team today for personalised support.
Website Data Analytics:
When developing your new website with Extramile Digital, every effort is made to ensure the professional positioning and targeted reach of your priority audiences to support your real-world objectives.
Our use of Google’s suite of marketing platforms provides you the opportunity to manage, monitor and analyse your websites analytic data, for measurable quantitative performance.
Introduction to Google’s suite:
- Google Analytics: The successor to Universal Analytics (UA), Google Analytics or GA4 provides a comprehensive platform to monitor user traffic and behavioural habits across your site. In depth details such as user location, page engagement time and conversion rates may be acquired and monitored across specified time periods to monitor your website’s performance.
When migrating to a new website, it is integral to ensure your Google Analytics tag is present on your website to track user data within the platform.
- Google Search Console: Also known as GSC, Google Search Console provides a platform to monitor and manage organic search data and the indexability of your website’s pages. GSC can be connected to GA4 to provide greater details in analytics reports.
- Google Tag Manager: Also known as GTM, Google Tag Manager provides a succinct and powerful platform to manage tags across your website. Custom events may be created to connect with your brand’s key objectives, helping to create greater insights into website performance.
As part of our website migration services, our Digital Marketing team supports enhanced data tracking across your new website, aligning functionality with data performance visibility to support your business goal management.
Data Benchmarking:
When migrating your website, it is imperative to collect relevant pre-live data to compare and benchmark against your post-live data. At Extramile Digital, our data benchmarking processes take into consideration:
- Priority Metric Analysis – In favour of vanity metrics, our data benchmarking reports on key performance insights such as individual users, engagement rates and your specific conversion events to monitor Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that matter to your objectives.
- Time Matched Periods – When analysing website performance data, it is important to remove as many variables for analysis as possible. Our process analyses data centred around the day before and the day after your website’s go live date to minimise the effects of seasonality and wider market trends.
- Data Tracking Changes – By law, your website must adhere to the latest GDPR and privacy legislation. Changes to data tracking pre to post live may as a result impact the volume of traffic that you may track. As a result, user data may be higher than recorded influencing potential changes pre and post live. Our digital marketing team is well versed in handling and analysing such matters.
So What is Next?
Interested in our website development and migration services? Discover more about building a new website with Extramile Digital here, or explore our range of case studies here for further inspiration.
We offer an extensive range of tailorable digital marketing services including, SEO, PPC, email marketing and social media management to compliment your brand’s marketing strategies and objectives. For more information contact our friendly, specialist team today.
