Prioritizing Technical SEO Issues with Cody Gault

Are you considering a site migration? Migrations are a challenging - and sometimes dreaded - step in SEO. With site migrations, chances are you're going to run into technical issues and nine times out of ten there's not enough time to fix everything before launch. The key is to build a good relationship with your developers, working together to solve critical issues. Cody Gault, Website Migration Lead at Conductor joins Loren Baker for this migration episode. We have some great questions left from an SEJ Webinar we had with Cody a while back, along with some new topics to help you with your next big update. This episode is perfect for anyone who is migrating platforms, changing URLs, updating branding, or trying something new for their website. At the end of the day, the more crawls you do, the closer you can get to what the site will actually look like in a live environment. –Cody Gault Do the 301 redirects. It’s the gospel. With canonical, Google may or may not honor it. –Cody Gault About half of site migrations are about finding the technical side of issues, and the other half is about having a team that can solve them and works well together. –Cody Gault [00:00] - About Cody and how he got started performing website migrations [02:41] - Cody’s first big migration: An International website migration [05:04] - How can broken link 404 reports help you identify and fix website issues? [05:29] - How to preplan a website migration and reduce the risk of making mistakes [07:05] - How to prioritize redirects and take some of the work out of site migrations [07:49] - Common website migration mistakes [10:06] - Should you immediately redirect old URLs to the new ones? Or use canonicals before redirecting? [13:32] - Do 301 redirects slow down your site? [17:05] - Is it better to change the title tags and meta descriptions or leave them as is? [18:57] - Timing your website changes and how that affects rankings [20:36] - How to test a site’s usability and