how to deal with content migration: from an old to a new website

When you are doing a website migration with lots of pages, it might be challenging to decide what to migrate and what pages not?

Here is a plan (step by step)

Step 1: export all urls (e.g using Google Analytics)

Step 2: enrich the urls data with a) organic visits (also coming from Google Analytics) in last e.g. year b) unique pageviews last year (so also including traffic coming from social, email, … )

Step 3a: enrich the urls with associated keywords (can be extracted from Google Search Console).

Step 3b: using the Keyword planner (Google Ads) enrich the data with monthly traffic. This indicates how much potential thet keyword has.

Step 3c: Enrich the page url with position (ranking) for that keyword.

Now one has a sheet with all page urls enriched with quite some information.

Next, how to decide what data to keep, trash, update?

Rules to keep the page

1. Organic Traffic is quite high (let’s say at least 50 visitors last year)
2. Traffic is quite high (let’s say 50 visitors last year)
3. When traffic is too low: estimate if there is potential for it (high monthly search volume and ranking is decent enough to try to get higher rankings).
4. Low traffic but it’s a page that must be there from a business stand point (e.g. locations or testimonials, … )

In this sheet make a column to indicate what you want to do with tha t page on the new website.

1. Redirect
2. Keep (as-is)
3. Keep (refresh content)

Redirect means, we will not keep that page, but instead redirect to another page that IS relevant.
Keep (as-is) means we will just keep (=migrate) the content without a update.
Keep (refresh content) means we will keep the content but will do an update. E.g. because the content is outdated and/or to try to rank better (by adding more relevant content).

Examples of pages to delete

• too old news items
• content that is really outdated (e.g. that software version you are writing about is not available any longer)