How to Monitor a Site Migration

Overview

Sometimes, a new website domain is in order. Maybe the business’ name changed, or perhaps it was acquired or merged with another. Sometimes, it might just be that the strategies to sell your products or services have been modified to where a site migration is the best way to accommodate the changes. 

When any of this happens, it’s important to stay on top of the impact this has on your traffic and optimization. Being able to monitor your market share as you transition from the previous domain to the new one is imperative to ensure your competitors don’t sneak in and steal your share. 

Similarweb has the tools to stay on top of this and monitor your performance going forward. Let’s check out how…

 

Solving for a Site Migration

There are a few different ways to keep track of this transition from one site to another. 

Rank Tracker

First, let’s set up a Rank Tracker. This is a fantastic tool that allows you to monitor your organic ranking position on a daily basis. Read more about the feature and how to set one up in detail here. For this use case, you’ll want to…

1. Select your new domain and the old domain. 
2. Input the keywords.
     

           PRO Tip: Don’t know all the keywords you want to analyze? Hop over to the Keyword Generator to compile a list which you can then put into a Rank Tracker campaign.    

3. Once you’re on the Overview page, you can immediately compare the two sites to see the overall SERP positions, aka is the new domain catching up to the old one. You’ll see the day-by-day breakout in the chart above. 

4. The Keywords report (in the Rank Tracker) will allow you to see which terms the old domain is still ranking higher for, while simultaneously providing where the new domain is seeing gains and surpassing the previous domain.

5. Keyword Trends is an even more comprehensive report to track the changes of the SERP positions of each site for each keyword.

 

SERP Players

Once the Rank Tracker is set up, move along to SERP Players, which is found under Search Intelligence > Keyword Research > Keyword Explorer. This report will provide you a long list of websites that are receiving traffic for the Keyword or Keyword List you want to analyze. 

Note: Technically this is analyzing beyond the two domains in question, however this will show you where each domain is benchmarking across all players. As mentioned above, this is also how you can monitor who else might be stealing your search traffic share as you transition domains.

 

 

Site Audit

Let’s set up a Site Audit too. This will crawl both sites to ensure optimization and learnings for technical improvement.

 

 

Website Analysis

Finally, let’s set up a traffic trend in Website Analysis. This will be the best way to ensure that your strategies are working. 

1. Go to Website Research > Website Analysis > and type in your new domain. 
2. Once that’s loaded, click the Compare button up top and input the old domain.
     

             PRO Tip: This is a great place to add a few competitors if you’d like to see how the traffic they receive is potentially affected by your site migration.   

3. Click on the Traffic and Engagement report from the lefthand menu. 

4. If you click on the + button above the report, you can add this to a Dashboard to stay on top of the change. Considering it's likely that you’re beginning this research before the change has taken place, a Dashboard will be especially helpful so you can easily go back to this report once the change takes place. (For more instructions on Dashboards, click here.)

 

 

Market Analysis - Monitoring the “Move” from One Site to the Other

An additional step could be to create a custom industry of your new and old domains, and then set up a Market Analysis report to see if you’re adequately gaining traction, or 

1. Follow the steps here to create a custom industry. You can start by going to Market Analysis and clicking on the Custom Industry button.
2. Once that’s set up, select the custom industry you created from the list. You can also type it in the blank space and it will appear in the results.

3. Once set up, go to the Players report from the lefthand menu. Under the Market Shares module, select the share icon in the top right corner, and you’ll see the “drain” from the old site to the new.

4. Add competitors to see where other sites might be stealing your traffic. For example, in your transition, you might anticipate that you’re going to lose about 10% of the traffic. Use this to understand where it is going.