Start creating migration briefing documents

Nikki says: “Use a migration briefing document with your client at the start of the migration briefing process.

It’s a document that’s designed to help you gather as much information as possible and avoid issues later down the line.

Ultimately, you want to capture all of the information about the project as early as possible, and have it documented so that you can refer back to it as needed.”

Is a migration briefing document necessary for every migration?

“I would say so. A lot of the questions that go into it might seem standard or obvious, but the problem is that they’re not written down or they become lost in endless email chains. If you have that central location, everything is there and ready from the start.

It’s right for every business and every type of migration because it’s not specific. At some point, most websites go through a migration – whether it’s a design change, a domain change, or whatever. Regardless of what industry you’re in or what type of website you have, there will be a migration of some type. Because of the number of moving parts, things can easily go wrong, and this helps you avoid that.

You start with this as a template, but then add to it, change it, and customise it based on the information that you need to know, as the SEO who is part of that project. If you know that client A has challenges that client B doesn’t have, make sure to capture that in the migration document at the start.”

What should you include in a migration briefing document?

“I’ll give you some examples of the questions that I tend to include in my briefing documents, and that’ll give you an idea of what I’m talking about.

Firstly, though, it doesn’t have to look a certain way. I call it a migration briefing document, but it can be a Word document, a spreadsheet, or whatever you and your client are happy to work with – as long as it can gather the information.

Some of the things that I include are: What is the reason for the migration? What is being migrated? Is it the whole site? Is it just the blog? When are you planning to go live? You want to know if that’s a crucial deadline and how that lines up with peak business or sales seasons.

We have a client who is currently experiencing delays, but they cannot delay the launch because of peak season. That’s something that we flagged at the start, so it’s not a surprise to us. We factored it into our resourcing.

Other questions include how far along they are in the build process. Not every client comes to an SEO right at the start. They might want to migrate next week. If you get that on paper, you can start to plan and raise concerns straight away. You’ve got it documented for you to refer back to.

You want to know what developer support and resources they have. Is it internal or external? You want to know what lines of communication you can set up with them, such as Slack. You also want to know what’s actually changing. Get it written down on paper. How is the design changing, if at all? What URLs are changing? What’s the new structure going to look like?

Hopefully, you’re only changing one thing at a time, but we know how migrations work. Other departments start to get involved and people want other things to change as well.

The last couple of examples concern the CMS. You want to know what CMS is going to be used on the new site, and if that differs from the current one. You want to know how much support they’re going to need in the redirect mapping. Is it something the developers are going to handle, or do they want you to do it?

Finally, what specific goals do they want to achieve from the migration? How can you measure the success of it? What KPIs does the business care about? What KPIs do you, as SEOs, care about? Align the two and agree on certain ones that can be used to gauge the success of the migration.”

How far in advance should planning and creating a migration briefing document start?

“Right at the start, during the specification process, while the stakeholders are meeting and budgetary conversations are being had. That’s when you want to be having these conversations.

As soon as possible, is the short answer. There’s not an ideal time scale because no two migrations are the same.

We’ve been working on a migration for somewhere between 6 and 9 months, but I’ve done one recently that only took 1 month. It’s not that you need to get this document prepared 6 months in advance for every migration, you just need to get it done as soon as possible.

The minute a client contacts me and asks about my services for their migration, I go back to them with a migration briefing document. That helps me plan my resources, look at my time, and work out my costs because I know what sort of support they need from me. Whether you’re an agency or an individual, get those questions out and get your migration planning documents sorted as soon as possible. It will create fewer headaches further down the line.”

Do you ever get clients who have done a migration and want you to check whether everything’s been done correctly from an SEO perspective?

“All the time. A lot of them seem to think that they can do a migration and then ask us to just ‘SEO it’. I’d love to know what that means.

The classic query is, ‘We’ve migrated it, but things are down, and we don’t know what happened.’ A lot of people think that a migration is simple. If they’re changing from .co.uk to .com, they think it’s obviously going to be better, therefore things are going to go well. They don’t take into consideration the bigger picture and what that actually means in terms of redirect mapping, how it can affect customers, Google indexing, and all these other things.

The migration document covers all of that. When people come to us, I want to find out what they’ve done, when it happened, and what support they had. I get them to send me any redirect mapping that they did and try and work backwards to get to the root of the problem and see what we need to do to fix it.

I will look at traffic but, if they’re coming to me and saying that things have gone wrong, I already know that things are going to be down in GA or Search Console. I focus on the tech side. I look at what’s happened in the various analytics tools, but I want to fix it, so I want to find out what happened that led to that. Then, I can work with other people or the internal team and dive a lot deeper into the analytics.

I’m looking at the how and the why, and then we can get to the bottom of it and move forward.”

What are the key people that you need to get on board with your document and ensuring that migration is a success?

“It’s your key point of contact – whether that’s a marketing manager, another SEO professional, or a higher stakeholder. You need your main point of contact to be involved and know what this document is for.

In my experience, once I’ve explained it, it’s never been an issue. They get it and they know that it can benefit them, especially if they have higher-ups to answer to. They know that this is the central resource that they can also refer back to.

It becomes useful when other departments suddenly want to change something. You can show that it’s not in the scope of the migration because you’re focusing on specific things, so everything else can be done further down the line.

If you can get higher-up stakeholders involved, that’s great. The more the merrier. You don’t need developers to be involved, but if they want to be, that’s great too. Get their contact details in there. Then, if you have a problem with redirects or the website goes live and it’s still noindexed, you can refer back to your document and find the email address of the person you need to contact. It can be a very flexible document for people at all levels.”

Do you ever advise against a migration?

“I haven’t, but it’s an interesting question. That’s why one of the first questions I ask is, ‘What is the main reason for the migration?’ If it’s just because the CEO thinks it’s a good idea, then maybe not. If you’re changing it because you want to be able to expand in the future or you’re moving to a new CMS, which will give you XYZ functionality, then great. I’m all on board.

If you’re doing it because Fred down at the pub said you should, then probably not. I’ve never had to do it, but I certainly would – at the very least, I would ask additional questions before progressing any further.

It might just be that I’m not the right person for them to work with because I don’t agree with their approach or the way it’s going. In that case, ‘Best of luck to you, here are some other people who you might find helpful.’”

Do you ever put a financial value on failure to motivate people to get it right?

“I do this in my wider tech work, but I’m also doing it in the actions that come off the back of the migration. Once you’ve done a migration, whether it’s gone well or poorly, there will be some form of action that you need to take.

It’s about getting that buy-in. I’ve created a ‘revenue-at-risk calculator’, and I use that because not all tech issues are created equal. You can’t compare fixing site speed to updating your canonicals.

When I use this calculator, though, it’s all measured in the same way. I use traffic metrics, search volume, conversion data, and several other things – as well as looking at the number of issues that I’ve found and how big those issues are relative to others. All of that factors into a final revenue-at-risk that I come out with.

That’s how I explain to the client that, if we don’t take action, based on their data, this is the revenue that they risk losing. That’s often quite a motivating number.”

Have you ever done an SEO consultancy job and recommended a migration yourself?

“We did do that a few years ago, for a client in the financial industry. That was because their current CMS was a really old legacy system. It was a custom build and even changing content took at least four different people, and it was a nightmare. Being in the financial industry, things change quite often with interest rates, etc., so they had to update it quite frequently.

We put a case forward for why their current setup wasn’t fit for purpose. They knew the issue and they wanted to do it, but they had to get their higher-ups to pay for it. We were able to support them in that. They did eventually move to a new headless CMS, and they were very happy.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“Stop taking such a laissez-faire attitude towards migrations. Migrations take up a lot of time. If you’re doing lots of other things at once, or getting caught up in various other actions for the client, it becomes incredibly time-consuming. That’s even more the case when a lot of other teams get involved.

Get this migration briefing document in place and agree on what is happening. Anything else needs to be outside of the scope and can be tackled at a later date. Use that to cut out a lot of the noise and make sure that everyone knows exactly what is being worked on, why, and who is responsible for each action.”

Nikki Halliwell is a Technical SEO Consultant, and you can find her over at NikkiHalliwell.com.