You are leading SEO for a site migration with new URLs, new CMS and a redesign. How do you manage the risk?
What the interviewer wants to hear
- Involve SEO early and benchmark current performance
- Full URL inventory and one-to-one redirect map
- Test on staging: crawl, redirects, content parity, rendering
- Launch checklist and post-launch monitoring
- Avoid changing too much at once if possible
Model answer
Migrations are high risk, so I join the project early. First I benchmark current traffic, rankings, conversions and top linked pages, and suggest splitting changes into phases if possible, since changing URLs, CMS and design together makes problems hard to isolate. I build a full inventory of URLs from crawls, sitemaps, analytics and backlink tools, and create a one-to-one 301 redirect map. On staging, which is blocked from indexing, I crawl the new site, test redirects, check content and metadata parity, internal links, canonicals, structured data and JavaScript rendering. On launch day I verify redirects, robots.txt, sitemaps and Search Console. After launch I monitor crawl errors, indexing and traffic daily, fix issues quickly, and agree a rollback plan in advance.
Can you answer it under time pressure?
Take a timed hard round and get scored on every answer.
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