We’re not being biased, honest! We chatted with Lauren, who’s one of two Lauren’s (yes, it does get confusing) behind the marketing at Redirectly and subsequently Abstrakt (for those that don’t know, Abstrakt is the agency behind the Redirectly App).
So, Lauren (we just call her OG) has been in marketing both in-house and agency side, and is familiar with ins-and-outs of digital marketing when it comes to 301 redirects and website migrations, involved in both sides of the coin.
When we casually asked Lauren about her thoughts on 301 redirects during a site migration, she said, “301 redirects are the job you love to hate, but mostly hate. Tedious, time consuming, and unbearably repetitive.”
Sound familiar? When we first mentioned Redirectly as a concept, both Lauren’s practically bit our hands off at the possibility of sparing them the task.
“Don’t get me wrong. It’s a necessity and I’ve seen a lot of clients over the years skip out on the step, even against recommendation. It always ends with the same story: broken links, confused and frustrating user journeys, and an inevitable drop in SERPs.”
Prior to Redirectly and testing out the app during our BETA stages, Lauren was working with spreadsheets to generate her redirect lists for website migrations. When asked about it, she said: “It sounds like a nightmare and it was. There’s so much room for human error and oversights with spreadsheets. There’s always a second pair of eyes too, so depending on the website and the amount of URLs attached, it can be something of a mammoth task. You never want to draw the short straw and it zaps resources instantly.”
Yikes! That sounds pretty tiresome, as we chatted more about the process, the copying and pasting, the constant referring back and occasional formulas that weren't working out: #Name? anyone, no, thank you. Lauren mentioned some of the horror stories both she and other clients she’d known over the last decade had experienced.
“I worked with a client awhile back who migrated their site and changed their URL/sitemap structure, but never put any redirects in place. It was chaos. None of the social links worked anymore or the social shop links to the products. The articles had lost their positions in SERPs as well as some of the core website pages, too. When they were eventually fixed, it took time for positioning to recover, without having had the proper migration strategy in place.”
That had some noticeable effects on the ecommerce website, which led to a drop in sales, with less organic and social traffic being driven to the website. Lauren also noted that it can have dire consequences for social media marketing, with so many consumers becoming less and less trusting, as social networks grow less authentic, so broken links really discourage credibility and in turn, prevent sales.
What about Redirectly then? How has that made a difference for agency work and the clients that are using the redirect tool too?
“Redirectly has made a big difference for us and our clients. It’s a huge time saver, as it’ll automatically match URLs and take the bulk of the work out of the equation immediately. Then it’s just down to us to go in and match the rest, by literally dragging and dropping. Once we’re done, I just alert our developer through the app and they do the rest by importing the redirect list in the format they need. What used to take days sometimes, can take less than an hour now. It’s been a game changer for us and the marketers we work with say the same.”
Sounds great! We’d give ourselves a pat on the back, but Lauren’s already done that. Quite aggressively actually, she was that happy.
Saving time, curing boredom and preventing your eyes from seeing nothing but cells (of the spreadsheet variety), why not check out more of Redirectly’s features and our plans.
