8 Things You Must Consider When Migrating A Website For SEO
MIGRATION PITFALLS & SOLUTIONS
The process of migrating websites and SEO is not always straight forward.
Here are the most common business scenarios to consider:
- New sub domains
- New domain names
- Changing sitemaps
- Changing servers
- Migrating CMS systems (themes, plugins, databases, etc)
- Changing hosts
- International expansion and new domain strategies
- New designs, rebranding – including new content, themes, layouts and website infrastructure (brand new sites)
The impact on SEO (search engine optimization) and search engine results can be significant, so extreme care must be taken when planning for SEO and website migrations.
Businesses cannot afford to lose traffic, drops in ranking, page authority loss, duplicate content confusion, dilution of link “juice”, to name a few likely issues.
Here are potential SEO breaking points.
Before and after snapshots:
- Ranking reports
- Listing of top organic pages
- Total indexed pages
- Broken links
- Duplicate content
- Site performance
- Meta data and links (titles, descriptions, H<x> Tags, URLs, Sources, PageViews, 301 Redirection and grouping)
- Web analytics traffic patterns, behaviors and overall engagement (conversions)
- Internal and external link audit and matching to new locations
- Spider of all pages and storage of all meta elements and content
Sanitation and website health improvement:
- Tracking and removing dead/thin/non-useful pages (old blog posts, low/no value pages, archive pages, etc)
- Streamlining of URLs and better keyword to URL matching (including redirects)
- Outbound link authority strategy review and addition of new links
- Long tail title tag review and improvement
- Key pages – expansion to include at least 1,200 words on essential pages, providing valuable resources
- Google Search Console integration and monitoring
- Robots.txt review and upgrade
- SSL inclusion
Measuring success and overall impact after migration of your website will lay in the hands of your webmaster and marketing (SEO) teams.
Before and after report and dashboards should be made available to executives and key stake holders, including follow-up audits and a post-mortem team call.
Get on a 30 minute coaching call with us and together, we'll figure out the first steps for you to become successful with your website migration & SEO.