Preparing for Your International Website Migration | BFO

April 27, 2016

3 Minute Read

If you are anticipating undertaking a website migration, whether on a single domain or across multiple languages and territories, it is important that you plan this project effectively and prepare any potential issues that may occur.

A website migration is no easy feat; even undergoing the detailed planning process can be a formidable prospect for most skilled and practiced teams, as there are a wealth of factors to keep at the forefront of your mind.

However, there are three central factors that need to be considered:

  1.    Managing and limiting the loss of SEO value
  2.    User experience
  3.    Local language variation

Managing and limiting the loss of SEO value from your website

Some loss of SEO value is inevitable as you undergo the migration process—you are, after all, undertaking a massive project and changing the domains of hundreds, potentially thousands of pages.

However, you can mitigate this loss with a clear strategy to preserve as much ‘juice’ as possible. Consider the importance of 301 redirects, the hierarchy of your webpages, and duplicate content as you prepare to migrate.

User experience (UX)

It’s important to provide your customers and prospects, wherever they are in the world, with a consistent, clear experience. Customers should experience the same brand message, product or service offering and be primed to take the same actions regardless of locale, which can be obtained with a full translation service.

Local language variation

The third pillar of the migration process is ensuring that you pay close attention to your customers’ language, and include regional variations of slang or everyday terms that make your customers feel comfortable when they reach your website. In order to make sure that your translation is correctly and naturally matched to regional variations, using native speakers to translate your copy is a great way to capture the subtle linguistic nuances of other languages

In our step-by-step guide, we will look to provide an overview of the migration planning process and highlight potential pitfalls that may occur in the migration minefield.

To learn more, download the full e-book here.

BFO-International-Website-Migration-eBook-Cover-01

As a real-life example, you might also like to take a look at Motorola Solutions’ experience which was highlighted at Share ’15. Motorola Solutions completed an extensive website migration for over 18,000 pages, across 17 locales, 12 languages and five English versions.

If you would like to read more about Motorola’s experience, and how they successfully navigated a substantial website migration, check out the SlideShare presentation below.

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The BFO Team

Here at BFO, we're always striving to bring you the latest and greatest in digital marketing insights and education. We're not ones to brag, but we've been lucky enough to be featured in all sorts of fancy publications and media outlets, strutting our stuff and showing off our industry expertise.