Below you’ll find the following guides to migrate your site to a new platform:

• Background on Site Migration & Its Effects
• Best Practices Prior to Migration
• Best Practices During & After Migration
• Overall Migration Timeline
• Next Steps: Outside of the Migration

Background on Site Migration & Its Effects

A site migration can affect a site in both positive and negative ways. An overview of these effects is listed below:

Potential Negative Effects from a Migration:

• Loss in rankings, resulting in:
  • Decreased visits and conversions

Why can this occur?

Often, the majority of these affects do not occur from the change in CMS, but from changes to content or structure required by the shift to the new CMS. The amount of changes needed to the existing structure & content will determine the amount of negative effects that occur.

• Ultimately, the more changes that are made when the content is ported over will cause confusion to search engines.
  • For example, if once the site is migrated, the search engines cannot find the same content that once appeared in a certain location on the site; they will demote the rankings of that content.
  • Additionally if the internal navigation of the site is adjusted, the search engines may not pass as much value to certain pages, again leading to demoted rankings.
• Often, these effects are temporary. It takes search engines weeks or months to fully crawl a new site. Once a new site is fully crawled, rankings can potentially rebound. Don’t panic if you see your blog’s rankings drop!
• If you plan to change the URLs of current content to a new location, it is vital that the original content is 301 redirected to its new URL, to clearly indicate to Google where the content now lives.

Potential Positive Effects from a Migration:

Switching to a new platform often means a more up-to-date CMS with advantages including:

• Increased flexibility to add title, h1 and meta descriptions
• Increased flexibility to create new pages and add new content
• The ability to make these optimizations lead to increased rankings, resulting in:
  • Increased visits and conversions

Why can this occur?

Your current platform may be limiting in its features and site owners often switch platforms for new features, or more flexibility.

• This flexibility can lead to faster optimizations and faster benefits in search visibility.

So, how can I reduce the potential negative effects?

Try and maintain the content and structure of the existing site as much as possible, in particular:

• Maintain the same URL structure
• Maintain the same title, h1 and meta descriptions (if any exist)
• Maintain the same internal navigation (if it the site is already being properly crawled)

Best Practices Prior to Migration

Benchmark All Major Metrics

Please see below for a list of metrics we recommend benchmarking prior to the migration. Having a status on these metrics prior to the migration will help you to assess the progress of the site after the migration by having “before” and “after” data to compare.

Indexed Pages & Crawl Errors

• Use Google Webmaster Tools to track the number of pages currently indexed by Google.
• Also, use this tool to see how many crawl errors the site currently experiences prior to the migration (this will help you to assess of the number of crawl errors once the site is launched should be an area of concern).

404 Pages

• Use Webmaster Tools to determine the current total number of 404 pages appearing on the site. This will allow you to assess if the migration is leading to an increase in 404 pages.
Site Authority Metrics
• Record your sites domain authority and page rank prior to migration.

Backlinks, Linking Root Domains and Site Networks
• Use Google Webmaster Tools, as well as tools like OpenSiteExplorer or AHrefs, to determine the number of backlinks currently pointing to your site from other sites.
• Record the number of linking root domains (read: other sites) and site networks currently linking to your site.

Keyword Rankings

• Spot-check and record the keyword rankings of your priority terms just before migration.

Traffic, Conversions and Conversion Rates

• Using Google Analytics, record and reference the amount of traffic to your site on a monthly and yearly basis, as well as the number of conversions and conversion rates, prior to the migration.

Duplicate Pages

• Record the number of duplicate pages currently on your site. (This will help to assess if the migration leads to an increase in duplicate content that we’ll need to address.)

Setup Re-Design on a Beta or Development Site

• Depending on the flexibility of the platform you choose, the most ideal situation is to have a beta or development version of the site setup prior to the launch.
• This is highly recommended and allows you to troubleshoot and test the new site before it’s launched. (Reference)
• If a beta or development site is created, it is extremely important that it is not indexed in Google. If both the old site and beta site are indexed in search engines, they will appear as duplicate content and can cause a drop in rankings.

Best Practices During & After Migration

Submit New/Optimized Sitemap to Search Engines

• It is important to submit a new sitemap to search engines at the same time the new site is launched.
• The sitemap serves to indicate to search engines any changes made to the site and also indicates to the search engines the best path to crawling the site.

Monitor Site Performance Weekly

Once the site is migrated, monitor the performance of the metrics that you benchmarked prior to the migration, they are as mentioned:

• Indexed Pages & Crawl Errors
• 404 Pages
• Site Authority Metrics
• Backlinks, Linking Root Domains and Site Networks
• Keyword Rankings
• Traffic, Conversions and Conversion Rates
• Duplicate Pages

Conduct an Architecture Audit of Your Blog

Once your site is migrated, we recommend reviewing it for the following issues (some of the items reviewed in the audit overlap with benchmarked metrics):

Duplicate Pages & Duplicate/Missing H1s, Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
• Review the amount of duplicate content and eliminate the duplicate pages, or have them redirect to the correct page.
• Search for any missing tags and update them to include your key terms.

Redirects
• Review all redirected pages to ensure they’re redirecting to the correct locations and that they’re all 301 directs. (302s are frowned upon by Google so avoid them wherever possible.)

404 Pages
• Use Google Webmaster Tools again to find any 404 pages that exist on the new site and have the 301 redirected to their correct location and/or swap out any internal links to 404 pages to their correct new location.

Crawl Errors
• Review the site for any crawl errors and ensure these are corrected.

Internal Navigation & Linking
• Review the internal navigation structure of the site to ensure the structure is passing the strongest amount of link value possible through the site

Google Analytics Code
• Check to make sure the Google Analytics code is included on all pages of the migrated site to ensure no tracking is lost during the switch to the new platform.

Content
• Review the site to make sure no content was lost during the site migration.

Robots.txt
• When a search engine crawler comes to your site, it will look for the robots.txt file. This file tells search engines which web pages of your site should be indexed or which should be ignored.
• Review your Robots.txt file to ensure that it is optimized to tell search engines to crawl only the most relevant pages and to ensure it carries over any settings you may have had prior to the migration.

With the guides above, you can carry your site to a new platform smoothly, while still taking advantage of all the features your new platform has to offer!

The post Migrating Your Blog to a New Platform: A Comprehensive Guide appeared first on AmpliFound.

Having the insight on what content brings your site more engagement can help inform future content decisions and help you determine what your visitors find the most interesting.

If you have Google Analytics tracking in place on your site, there are some key metrics that you can use to determine visitor engagement. There are also other metrics that may seem helpful but can be misleading. Additionally, assessing visitor engagement is a holistic evaluation – meaning it’s important to take into account 2-3 metrics, not just one at a time.

Here’s a guide on what we recommend you analyze to determine your visitor engagement.

PAGES/SESSION

The ‘Pages/Session’ metric in Google Analytics is pretty simple – it tells you the average number of pages any given group of visitors views per visit.

This metric is a number, for example: 3.89 pages/session, meaning visitors on average viewed nearly 4 pages (URLs) per visit.

• Typically a higher number of pages viewed per visit indicates more highly engaged visitors because they’re navigating through more of your site within one visitor session.
• However, it is important to keep in mind that if you’re seeing a high number of pages viewed per visit but the other engagement metrics are poor, this could indicate that visitors cannot find what they’re looking for (and need to navigate through many pages to find it) or don’t find one page interesting enough to stay very long.

So, let’s look at other important engagement metrics you’ll need to make a full assessment.

BOUNCE RATE

The ‘Bounce Rate’ metric in Google Analytics defines what portion of visitors reached a page on your site and then left the site without interacting with any other pages on the site, also known as a single-page sessions.

This metric is a percentage, for example: 75.89% bounce rate, meaning 76% of visitors to the site only viewed the page they landed on and then left. 

• Typically a higher bounce rate indicates poor engagement and a lower bounce rate indicates higher engagement.
• Once exception to this rule is if you maintain a single-page site (or maintain very few pages on your site).
  • In the case where the majority of information visitors are looking for can be found on one, or a few pages, a high bounce rate will occur because most visitors will land on a page, find what they need and then leave.

VISITOR FREQUENCY AND RECENCY

The ‘Visitor Frequency and Recency’ metrics within analytics are outside of the ‘main metrics’ most analytics users dig into but we highly recommend taking a look at this data. This area of analytics shows you how frequently visitors return to your site and how many days it’s been since their last visit.

Both of these metrics are displayed in bar-graph form at certain intervals. 

Frequency

• For visitor Frequency analytics displays how many visitors came to your site once, twice, or three times and so on, all the way up to visitors that have been to your site 200 times or more!
• The higher number of visitors you have returning to your site more frequently indicates that they’re coming back to your site for more and likely highly engaged.

Recency

• For visitor Recency; analytics displays how many days it’s been since visitors have last been to your site. This metric can imply different meanings depending on the content on your site.
• Do you publish content daily or weekly? Then a higher number of visitors that come to your site every few days would show high engagement. Or, do you do email blasts every month and only expect visitors to return every 30 days? The recency of 30 day intervals might be a more appropriate engagement goal.

SESSION DURATION (or TIME ON SITE)

This is going to be short and sweet; avoid using this metric (keep reading if you’re curious as to why or just trust me and move to the next metric).

Google Analytics uses many factors to calculate a visitor’s time on site but despite their complex formula, there are many other factors involved that can cause this metric to be inaccurate.

• For example, of the several factors included in measuring time on site, the amount of interactions a visitor has with a page is a determining factor of their total time.
• A visitor that could be on a page and reading content but not triggering what analytics calls ‘event hits’ (such as clicking a social plugin, completing an ecommerce transaction, etc.) could then in Google’s eyes yield a time on site of 0:00; even though they may have been reading an article for 4 minutes or more, for example.

Additionally, Google Analytics uses the time between pages to measure session duration – so:

• If a visitor views a page, then leaves their computer for lunch and then browses to another page on your site when they return (without ever having closed out of that window), then this entire time is computed into their session duration.
• So, sadly what may look like the visitor was on your site for an hour, was really only 3 minutes.

But have no fear! The other engagement metrics above and below not only paint the picture of your visitor’s engagement in place of this metric, but they do so more accurately.

NEW VS. RETURNING

This metric is similar to the frequency metric in giving you an idea of how your site performs in terms of bringing visitors back for repeat visits. The only difference from Frequency is this metric does not tell you how frequently visitors return but on a much more simple level – if your visitors are returning at all.

The New vs. Returning interface in Google Analytics is in both visitor count and percentage format. It displays what percentage of visits to your site are new and what percentage of visits to your site are returning.

• A higher percentage of return visits indicates higher engagement as they’re likely coming back for more!

With all these great metrics at your fingertips you can now fully understand if you’re visitors are engaged and if so, what content they’re engaged with and how you can build on improving their engagement.

The post Google Analytics: Metrics to Measure Engagement appeared first on AmpliFound.