Session #12 - Site Migrations Done Right: E-E-A-T, Architecture, and Avoiding Costly Mistakes

In this episode, Nate and Kevin sit down with Ten Speed's Manager of Organic Growth Strategy, Erika Braeger, to walk through how to approach site migrations and domain consolidations without tanking your organic performance. They cover the full lifecycle from setting clear business goals and crawling staging environments before launch, to preserving E-E-A-T signals, fixing redirect chains, and auditing legacy site architecture. Erika also shares the most common mistakes she sees along the way, including skipping content freezes, neglecting page speed, and missing authorship signals, and explains why each one matters more now that LLM visibility is part of the picture. Chapters (00:00:00) - Site Migrations(00:01:56) - Copyright, Authorship and Trust(00:03:58) - External Links on the Web(00:04:43) - Migration 101: Merging Websites(00:07:23) - Top-of-(00:08:34) - Crawl Budget and Site Structure in Website Migration(00:12:21) - Crawl Depth and Internal Linking(00:15:04) - Merging Multiple Sites: How To Plan For Internal Redirects(00:18:04) - Migration to Webflow: Crawl Depth Limit and More(00:21:04) - What are some, I guess the things that you think are critical(00:22:52) - Migration 1.8(00:25:09) - What Should You Plan For the Site Migration?(00:26:52) - Migration to a New CMS: The Need for Staging(00:29:25) - What type of expectations need to be set for a site migration?(00:30:36) - Migration and Branding: The Tradeoffs(00:33:40) - Top 10 SEO Mistakes(00:36:18) - Common CMS MISTAKES(00:40:59) - LLM Performance Benchmarks(00:42:18) - Common Phobias(00:42:34) - 3 Common MISTAKES Websites Make During Migration(00:46:29) - Top 10 Migrations Mistakes(00:48:06) - Content Freeze Ahead of a Migrations(00:50:49) - PODCAST: How to Write a Scripting Application in IE