Preparing your Conductor account for a website migration

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With careful preparation and tracking throughout the process, you can successfully navigate the site migration process to make sure you don't lose traffic and revenue. 

 

1️⃣ Map your keywords to your new site

Because your site structure is changing, you should make sure you update the preferred URLs associated with your tracked keywords in Conductor to reflect the new structure. 

  1. In Conductor, go to Keyword Bulk Update ↗️.

  2. At the top, select the web property group you want to upload keyword changes for.

  3. Follow the instructions to download your active keywords.

  4. Locate and open the Excel file that was downloaded to your computer.

  5. Confirm that the keywords you are tracking you want to continue tracking for your new site. If your products or services are targeted at different local markets on your new site, you should consider creating searches at a location and device based level. 

  6. Update the Preferred URL column to map your keywords to URLs in your new site.

Once you've mapped your keywords in the file, you'll need to upload the file back into Conductor: 

  1. Select one of the following methods you want to use to upload changes to your keyword list. You can see the instructions and examples for each option by clicking the option button.

    • Merge with Existing Keywords.

    • Override Existing Keywords. Note that if you choose this option, all keyword data is replaced with the data in the update file, and any existing keywords for the domain that are not in your upload file are made inactive. Data will not be collected for the inactive keywords.

  2. Choose your saved Excel file in the Upload Spreadsheet section at the bottom of the page.

  3. Click Next. (You will have a chance to review your changes before they are saved to your account.)

Finally, you can verify and save your updates: 

  1.  Verify the change details presented. In the Change Details table, green indicates additions to your keyword data and red indicates items that will be removed. If you want to make changes to the data or to the method of upload, click Back and make the necessary changes.

  2. After viewing and verifying that all the changes are correct, scroll to the bottom of the Change Details table and click Save.

 

2️⃣ Create page groups for your new site

If you haven't already created page groups in Conductor, these are groups of pages that you want to be able to see data for in aggregate. 

You can create rule-based smart page groups for areas of the site that were migrated or redirected so you can confirm that the performance carries over to the intended folders. 

For instructions to create page groups, review the Create a Page Group article. 

 

3️⃣ Use Conductor Monitoring to monitor your site's technical health in realtime

Use Conductor Monitoring to monitor your technical health throughout your migration: 

  1. Be sure to track your old site and your new site. You can even track your staging site with Conductor Monitoring as you build your new site to get ahead of issue before you go live. Just follow the instructions found here to enable HTTP authentication for your staging site.

  2. Create alerts for your old site to monitor 301, 302, of 307 redirects.

  3. Use Conductor Monitoring's Dashboard to monitor your new site's health during your rollout.

  4. After your migration is complete, review elements like indexation, canonical tags, status response, and overall performance to have the best chance to retain and improve your visibility and organic health.

  5. Customize your configuration to support your specific migration:

    • Migrating your CMS and not your site? You won't have to add a new site to Conductor Monitoring, but your can use Conductor Monitoring to monitor any redirects or content changes. Be sure to review your segment rules if your URL structure is changing.

    • Migrating your server? Focus on performance metrics in Conductor Monitoring. Be sure to enable Lighthouse Monitoring and to review the following features:

      • Issues > Conductor Monitoring Lighthouse Web Vitals

      • Issues > Web Vitals Origin Summary

Don't have Conductor Monitoring? Sign up for a free trial today! 

 

4️⃣ Track your progress throughout your migration

To assist with tracking your progress against benchmarks, you can create a benchmarking report that includes keyword rank data, competitive intelligence, and page insights. 

To build this report, create a new Workspace with the following widgets: 

  • Keyword Rank Data:

    • Custom widget header

  • Keyword Rank Visibility:

  • Keyword Performance All Keywords:

  • Successes

    • Keywords ↗️ table, filtered to show keywords that have moved onto the first page of results

  • Red Flags

    • Keywords ↗️ table, filtered to show keywords that have fallen off the first page of results

  • Opportunities

    • Keywords ↗️ table, filtered to show keywords currently ranking on the second page of results

  • Missed Opportunities

  • Competitive Insights

    • Custom widget header

  • Top Competitors Trended

  • Market Share Summary Before Migration

    • Market Share ↗️, Summary Bar, reporting time period set to report on period before migration

  • Market Share Before Migration

  • Top Competitors by Competitor Before Migration

  • Market Share Summary After Migration

    • Market Share ↗️, Summary Bar, reporting time period set to report on period after migration

  • Market Share After Migration

  • Top Competitors by Competitor After Migration

  • Content Performance

    • Custom widget header

  • Impact of Total Site Traffic on Organic Search

    • Pages ↗️, Paid vs Organic graph, show sessions or visits metric

  • Total Site Traffic

  • Organic Performance for All Pages

  • Pages Driving the Most Organic Traffic

    • Pages ↗️, table, show sessions or visits metric; sort to show pages in descending order

Related Resources

Want more help? Review the Website Redesign and Migration Checklist found on Conductor's Academy to make sure you address all of the potential pitfalls associated with a site migration.