Further define what Upgrade means for GitLab

Topic: Upgrade - What does this mean to our users, search engines, and our team members?

additional context - This came up in the iteration office hours call on 2020-07-22. See this comment (GitLab internal)

Further summary of that topic in the call:

Sid first mentioned "you have to upgrade the GitLab installation [meaning switch distro to EE] in order to move [up in tiers]" which can look "intimidating" so we should "make it easier" (perhaps easier to understand, easier to accomplish, and avoid the need altogether, where possible, by getting more people to start by installing EE in the first place even if they want to start on a free tier).

To demonstrate the process required, Sid's search was for gitlab ce to ee which yielded the first result "Upgrade to Enterprise Edition" https://about.gitlab.com/upgrade, however, when clicking, it redirected to https://about.gitlab.com/pricing. (This no longer seems to be the case.) There's some agreement in this issue for making docs the SSOT for this info.

Choosing a different result, https://about.gitlab.com/update/, and then following its link to "Upgrade GitLab CE to EE", brought Sid to the same unhelpful redirect to the pricing page. Now it's back to displaying https://about.gitlab.com/upgrade/. Still no route to context on tier/subscription info.

Business problem:

The word upgrade needs to be further defined, it can mean a couple of things in our business which is confusing for users, team members, and search engines.

Here are the 2 main upgrades I see:

1. Upgrade the version of GitLab for Self-Managed customers
2. Upgrade the tier of a customer's license for SaaS & Self-Managed

While the word upgrade works well for both it will confuse users and search engines inevitably causing problems to complete either task. This subsequently impacts the metrics we monitor for both version upgrades and tier to tier upgrades.

Additional problems to solve

1. When searching for upgrade the search results vary from our pricing page to various pages on our docs property and as a user I'm confused and don't know what to do.

Proposal:

Let’s come up with a plan to further define these 2 actions.

1. Action 1 - Upgrading a version of GitLab
   1. What should we call this?
   2. How should we communicate this to our users?
   3. Where should it live on our properties?
      1. Should this live in the product, marketing site and our docs?
   4. What SEO opportunities should we consider beforehand?
      1. When users are searching for information on how to upgrade their version of GitLab what words are they using to search?
      2. What’s the volume of the search terms?
      3. Are there any peripheral words that should be included in the way we communicate this action to our users and search engines?
2. Action 2 - Upgrading the tier of your GitLab license
   1. What should we call this?
   2. How should we communicate this to our users?
   3. Where should it live on our properties?
      1. Should this live in the product, marketing site and our docs?
   4. What SEO opportunities should we consider beforehand?
      1. When users are searching for information on how to upgrade the tier of their license with GitLab what words are they using to search?
      2. What’s the volume of the search terms?
      3. Are there any peripheral words that should be included in the way we communicate this action to our users and search engines?

Possible MVCs

1. Name and define the 2 actions above for version upgrades and tier to tier upgrades
2. Update the documentation for both actions
3. Refresh or create pages to improve our search engine results