The joys of website migration ! Updating your website content to a new platform or changing your website URL’s should be painless. It should not be a reason to you lose your search engine visibility. A SEO friendly website migration process is the only way of keeping things on track.
Why are you migrating your website
There are many reasons why you may need to migrate your website. Moving to https or changing a website theme. Going multilingual, or multicurrency. It is never far off the agenda for many brands and it often involves moving URL’s around. The website migration should be a flawless move, unfortunately it rarely is. It is one of the areas where organic traffic can fall or stay stagnant if it isn’t delivered meticulously.
A successful website content migration involves understanding what organic search visibility you had, before moving platform. And you how got it in the 1st place.
Critical to success is measuring and understanding what pages rank in search and why, before the technical migration takes place. This is why we benchmark every element of every page. And why a technical SEO audit can be very useful before migration. It helps you prioritise what should be fixed or what should be considered when creating your new web pages.
Website Content Migration Process
This is a long pre and post migration checklist that is passed onto to your developers to implement. It helps us keep on track of all the internal technical elements that help your pages rank in the SERPs. Mapping the old web pages to the new URL’s.
The checklist measures elements like Internal and external links and Blog Tags. This is to stop important pages and tags don’t get binned in the move. Content elements like Titles, Descriptions, Body Content and Images are measured for ranking and engagement. Technical elements like Indexation, Canonicalisation, Sitemaps, Robots, Hreflang, Schema Data, Rich Snippets and Load Time are measured. Lastly, we look at integration of Social Media and a critique of implementation.
Post Migration Checks
After the site is relaunched, each page is checked to ensure all elements are in place. We then compare it to its previous performance.
We use tracking tools like Google Analytics to measure engagement. Ranking data to measure SERPs. Google Search Console to measure technical indexation. Google Tag Manager to implement some changes, and Screaming Frog to measure how your website now crawls after the migration.
Please get in touch if you are planning a website migration as it could stop you losing your search engine visibility due to a poorly executed move. I can give you a reassuring hand through the process.