Global Website Migration Project: learnings from a search PM perspective
Migrating one website is challenging, as this activity usually includes different people, teams, and interests. Can you imagine migrating many at once? This is what we, the digital team of Nescafé, did on all of our websites (Europe, LATAM, AOA) last year.
The idea at first sounds crazy, but the fact is that doing a bulk migration like that taught us a lot as professionals and as a team. As the search lead I learned a few things, but this would be my “top 5 tips” for the Marina of the future (if she is brave enough to go through a global migration again — spoiler: she probably will):
1- Define a communication plan (and tweak it if needed)
Working with so many stakeholders across the globe means having to deal with people who respond differently to contacts. Some prefer emails, some rather have calls, while others only work through Teams chat.
Understanding who needs what makes it a LOT easier for people to adhere to the activities you want them to execute, that is why a complete (and flexible) communication plan is vital to make sure your message is reaching the right people at the right time.
2- Global migrations demand local SEO team support
It is only possible to cascade a global SEO strategy (that includes copy translations, redirect mapping, and keyword definition) with the support of a team that will do that at the local market level.
Language and market strategy skills are needed if you want things to be correctly localized after your migration and your global management team probably won’t be able to help you with that. And no, don’t try to do this yourself (you will probably miss something important in the process).
Having a team exclusively looking just for those tasks is a gamechanger for the perfect SEO migration. So save some extra budget to hire a local SEO partner (like an agency) or to boost your local SEO team to make sure everything goes fine in the migration process.
3- The redirect map is the only vital task — the other SEO activities can come after
Migrations are all about retaining the traffic of your old pages to your new pages, and only a complete and well-developed redirect map can help your technical team to execute that “traffic transference.” This document is the heart and soul of your new website (tacky but truth) and for this reason they need to be executed perfectly by your SEO specialists, brand and website team.
All the other SEO activities (metadata creation, content optimization) are not irrelevant, but can surely come after the site is live — just don’t forget to follow up on them once you have your new pages published!
4- Connect through calls with local teams whenever needed
SEO can be a challenging topic for brand teams — even digital ones. And we know we want to avoid meetings that can take precious minutes of our days (the whole “this meeting could be an email” kind of thing). But believe me: it is best to spend those extra minutes of your day in a call with a stakeholder who is struggling with the SEO tasks, than to have your new website live with basic SEO issues.
If that email thread with a specific stakeholder is getting to long and confusing, take some deep breaths and book that call that you wished you wanted it to remain as an email. You will thank me later.
5- Be repetitive
In big projects like a global migration, it is easy to lose basic information in a full inbox, in a long meeting, or in a team’s channel with many messages. Sometimes, repetition might do the trick to ensure your information is being considered.
If you have to write the same message in a email, say the same sentences in a meeting or repeat the same guidance in a call, do it. It is annoying, I know, but sometimes people just need a reminder to get a task done.
However, in a big project like that, the biggest lesson is the most simple: have people you trust working by your side. We all know that things can get messy during a project roll-out, and having those people to count on makes challenges look less complicated (or at least a little bit more fun).
Thanks to all my counterparts in this journey. What a ride!