Creating a fresh new website or switching to a new domain is exciting. It is a sign your business is evolving, a milestone on your company timeline where you want to utilise new technologies and upgrade your platform to produce a smoother user experience.
However, website migration is also a scary process, particularly when you factor in SEO. All it takes is for one slip-up to plummet your organic traffic levels. This is why it’s essential you know how to perform an effective SEO migration.
What Is a Website Migration?
In its most basic form, website migration is where one website is transferred from one place to an entirely different one. This new place could be a different domain, platform, or site structure.
There are various site migration types depending on the site changes that are required. These include:
- Site location change: This can be a rebrand by moving to a new domain, a new international website, merging elements of your site, or switching from HTTP to HTTPS.
- Platform change: You could move to a new platform that provides additional resources and features. It may also be a platform upgrade or the integration of different platforms.
- Structural change: Wholesale website hierarchy changes come under this category. This could also involve alterations to the user journey, your internal linking strategy, and site navigation.
- Content change: The addition or removal of pages, hiding content, introducing new languages, and consolidating content all come under this category.
- UX/design change: This can involve changing the look and feel of your website with a fresh new design. Site performance, such as load speeds, can also experience an upgrade.
SEO efforts can be affected significantly regardless of the kind of site migration. For instance, a domain transfer – even when seamless – could cause your rankings to drop for several weeks before they return to normal. Now, imagine the potential damage caused by a botched migration – an anxiety-inducing thought, right?
That’s why SEO site migrations must be carefully planned and executed. This is also why we have put together the following SEO migration checklist.
SEO Site Migration Checklist: How to Perform an SEO Migration
SEO site migrations carry plenty of risks. However, with the correct strategy and approach, you can mitigate these risks – and put your website on the right path towards organic traffic growth after the migration.
The following website migration SEO checklist covers everything you need to ensure your project goes smoothly.
Determine Your Objectives
What are you hoping to achieve from your planned migration? Are you looking to rebrand with a fresh new website design? Or, perhaps you’re aiming to merge multiple sites? Maybe it’s a simple case of moving from HTTP to HTTPS?
Whatever the case, defining your objectives is the first step to your SEO migration. Doing this gives you a clear picture of the challenges you face and the solutions required to overcome them. No migration is the same; something like freshening up your content is drastically different from moving to a new platform.
Measure Performance
A common mistake with SEO site migrations is the lack of research into organic results and keyword performance. Simply put, if you fail to measure site performance both before and after, you won’t gain a full understanding of the success – or failure – of your migration.
Ideally, you should monitor metrics such as keyword ranking positions and URLs for a couple of months before the migration. This negates fluctuations and gives a clear picture of how keywords were performing consistently. Then, once the migration is complete, you can see if keyword performance has been positively or negatively impacted.
Scrape Existing Site Data
This step is one of the most important points on any SEO site migration checklist. You need to scrape all existing data from your original website, including:
- All indexed pages
- MySQL and WP-Content backup files
- Meta titles and descriptions for each page
- Canonical tags for each page
Essentially, a copy of all this data acts as a safety net for your SEO site migration. For instance, if something goes wrong with your website migration SEO strategy, you can use this site backup information to help rectify the problem.
Test the Waters
You’ve probably gathered by now that SEO migration is not a small or straightforward task. It demands technical knowledge and excellent coordination across your business – and this is why your SEO migration checklist should include the point of a test run.
This test doesn’t have to be a major one; it can be undertaken in a sub-domain or sub-directory, for example. Yet by doing this small test, you can ensure everyone in your company is on the same page with your SEO migration strategy and understands everything that’s changed.
Prevent Your Staging Site From Being Indexed
If you’re building a new website, a staging site is required for you to put everything into place before the migration takes place. However, from a site migration SEO perspective, this staging site can pose a problem. The issue: Google could start crawling and indexing your staging site. That’s not good.
You don’t want users to access a site that is broken and incomplete. It can also lead to Google using the staging site in their search results – even after you have launched your new website. So, as part of your SEO migration checklist, ensure all crawlers are blocked from accessing the staged site.
Create an XML Sitemap
SEO site migrations require a lot of pre-launch elements. One of the most important for your SEO migration plan is to create an XML sitemap for your new website. This sitemap instructs search engines on how to navigate effectively through your site.
Tidy Up After Launch
So, you’ve covered all website migration SEO elements. You’ve also done the testing. Next, you have to take the biggest step of all: launching your new site.
However, the work isn’t over yet. There’s some cleaning up you have to do. Site migration SEO errors could still be present after the move, which might include broken links and duplicate content, for example. As part of your site migration SEO checklist, you must scan your new website for these errors – and correct them ASAP.
Also, remember when you told Google not to index your staging site? Well, now you need to update your robots.txt files and give them the green light to start crawling your pages.
Need Assitance? Our SEO Migration Services Have Your Back
Is the above checklist a tad overwhelming? Don’t worry – many businesses are intimidated by the prospect of completing a site migration on their own. With all the risks involved, that anxiety is understandable. Fortunately, though, there is an alternative route with professional SEO Migration Services – more specifically, ours here at Click Intelligence.
Rather than trying to complete this complex task alone, you can let our experts handle it for you. Along with making your website migration as smooth and risk-free as possible, our experienced gurus can minimise the impact the process has on your SEO.
No site migration is too big or too small for us; we’ve done it all before. Don’t hesitate to speak to our friendly team if you have questions or need help in this tricky corner of the internet – we’re only an email or phone call away.
