Thinking about migrating your website?
Whether you’re rebranding, switching platforms, or improving site security, a website migration can be a necessary and beneficial step. But it comes with risks. If it’s not done right, you might lose your hard-earned search engine rankings and organic traffic. Ouch!
The good news? With the right approach, a website migration without losing SEO is possible. By working with an SEO specialist, you can maintain all that online credibility you’ve built over the years.
So, how can you migrate your website without losing SEO and organic traffic? The answer lies in careful website migration SEO. Here’s everything you need to know.
What is Website Migration SEO?
Website migration SEO is the process of planning and executing a successful site migration in a way that the new domain will keep its rankings in search engine results. For many businesses, organic traffic is their bread and butter. The goal is to maintain or even improve your visitor numbers post-migration.
Sounds good? Great. But let’s take a step back for a minute. If website migration puts your SEO at risk, why bother? Well, there are many reasons why you might need to migrate your site:
- You’re rebranding to refresh your image, attract a new audience, or maintain your relevance.
- You’re moving to a new CMS or e-commerce platform to access better features and performance. For example, you might get more advanced analytics and reporting or faster load times.
- You need a different domain name to better reflect your brand or services. Perhaps your business has evolved since you set up your website. Or maybe you’ve expanded your service offerings.
- You’re upgrading your website to improve security with features like encryption or two-factor authentication.
All of these reasons justify a site migration, but you’ll need to undertake a few pre-migration steps. These include auditing your current site, backing up your data, and preparing XML sitemaps. We’ll dig into these tasks in a bit more detail below.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed at this stage, you’re not alone. SEO is technical, and with so much on the line, taking the leap and executing a site migration can feel like a huge financial risk. Working with 1UP Digital Marketing can help ease the transition and ensure all the right steps take place to ensure the website migration is successful.
We handle everything from planning to execution, delivering minimal downtime, SEO preservation, end-to-end support, and post-migration monitoring. Let’s walk you through the process of how we prepare for and execute a site migration. .
Preparing for Website Migration
Successfully migrating your website without losing SEO results is all in the prep work. Here are the steps we recommend taking before migrating your website.
1. SEO Audit
First, you need a good understanding of your current SEO results. Perform an SEO audit to identify your top-ranking pages and keywords. That way, you can preserve these elements on the new site.
2. Back-Up Your Website
Before starting the migration, back up your website. This is crucial—if anything goes wrong, you can restore your site to its previous state.
3. Set Up a Test Environment
Set up a test environment, or staging site, to test changes. This prevents disruptions to your live site during the migration.
During Migration
It’s officially go-time. Here’s your website migration checklist.
1. URL Structure
Keep your URLs consistent to avoid broken links.
Then, use 301 redirects to help preserve SEO value. They tell search engines that a page has permanently moved, passing along its ranking power and ensuring that Google finds the new page.
2. Domain Change Considerations
If you’re changing domains, update the domain settings and DNS records. Coordinate with your web/IT team or hosting provider to ensure all links and file references point to the new domain.
3. Submit Updated Sitemaps
Generate new XML sitemaps for your site. These files list all your website’s pages, helping search engines understand your site structure.
Then, submit the new sitemaps to search engines like Google, prompting them to prioritize indexing your new site.
Post-Migration
Don’t sleep on post-migration monitoring and maintenance. These steps further reduce your risk of losing precious organic traffic.
1. Monitor Performance
Monitor your website’s performance using Google Analytics. Track metrics like traffic, bounce rate, and keyword rankings. If you spot a problem like a sudden and lasting dip in traffic, make a plan to fix it as soon as possible.
2. Submit New Sitemaps
If you haven’t already, submit your new XML sitemaps to search engines. You want to do this sooner rather than later, as it usually takes a few days to a few weeks to fully index new pages.
3. Have Publishers Update Backlinks
Reach out to publishers of high-value backlinks and ask them to update the links to your new URLs. Even though 301 redirects help, having fresh URLs is better for long-term SEO.
Fix Any Issues
Your analytics reveal an issue with the new site—now what?
1. Identify the Problem
Use crawling tools, like Screaming Frog, SEMRush, Ahrefs, etc. to investigate your new site and help you find broken links, missing pages, and other errors.
If that doesn’t identify the issue, scrutinize your Google Analytics data. Scrutinize user behaviour for any unusual patterns.
Google Search Console is also great for spotting problems. Check for indexing issues, crawl errors, and warnings.
2. Consider These Common Issues
To give you a head start, here’s a quick list of common migration hiccups:
- Broken links hurt your site’s user experience and SEO. Use crawling tools like Screaming Frog to find and fix them. Don’t forget to update your internal links as well.
- Missing pages cause 404 errors, which are bad for users and rankings. Check for 404 errors in Google Search Console and create 301 redirects.
- Duplicate content confuses search engines and dilutes your SEO. Use tools to find and remove or update any repeated content.
- Make sure your canonical tags are set up right. These help search engines know which version of a page to index.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Website migration SEO isn’t always straightforward. For the very best chance of maintaining organic traffic post-migration, steer clear of these pitfalls:
- Not ensuring your 301 redirects are set up properly. This is absolutely critical to your site’s SEO value. All old URLs should redirect to the new URLs.
- Skipping your SEO audit to prevent issues that affect rankings and traffic.
- Not paying attention to internal links—don’t forget to check your blog posts, too. These need updating to reflect new URLs. Failing to do this can lead to broken links and a poor user experience, both of which could negatively impact your SEO.
- Not transitioning from HTTP to HTTPS correctly. If this is the transition you are taking on, this improves site security and is a must for SEO. In addition, imagine what visitors would think of your shiny new website when Google tells them it’s unsafe!
Zero Stress Website Migration Without Losing SEO Starts Here
You’ve worked hard to build a credible online reputation. Don’t risk losing it during a website migration.
Get in touch with 1UP Digital Marketing for professional help. Our experts protect your site’s SEO and organic traffic for a smooth, stress-free transition. Let us handle the technical SEO details so you can focus on your business.