Website migrations have the power to make or break your business’s organic search performance. Upgrading your content management system or ecommerce platform, or even changing your site’s overall design, can lead to ranking and performance improvements if done correctly. Site migrations without SEO consideration, however, can also lead to site crawling and indexing issues, declining rankings, traffic, and conversions, and high recovery costs.
An SEO professional needs to be involved during the entire site migration process, and why one must be involved from the start.
1. To Preserve Page Equity
Probably the biggest risk from a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective when it comes to migrating websites is improper redirect implementation. It’s likely some important pages will have URL changes with the launch of the new site, and going in without a redirect strategy can destroy the SEO equity your site has built up. If an important page from the old site returns a 404 file not found error after launch, the relevance, trust, and link authority that that page has collected over its lifetime will no longer benefit the site. Applying a 301 redirect to that page instead tells search engines to permanently transfer the link authority to the new page and deindex the old page, thereby preserving the value that the old page drove for the site. An SEO professional should create a 301 redirect map that contains all URLs that will be removed from the site or will change, identifying where each should redirect.
2. To Preserve Authoritative Content
One of the first actions taken during a site migration should be to conduct a content audit to determine high-value pages that should be carried over to the new site, and low-value pages that should be removed. Content that generally performs well in rankings, driving traffic or conversions, should definitely be migrated over to preserve performance and protect the relevance of the site overall. Properly benchmarking performance data is crucial to avoid accidentally removing important pages.
3. To Preserve Crawling and Indexation
Navigation changes, URL changes, or content consolidation can lead to important content losing link authority or being orphaned (not being linked to anywhere on the site). Even if the URLs are listed in the site’s XML sitemap, without a clear crawl path and internal link structure, Google may not discover the content or may determine that it’s not important content worth indexing. An SEO professional will crawl the staging site using a tool like Screaming Frog to identify orphaned pages or pages with a high click path.
The SEO person will also be able to determine if important pages are disallowed in the robots.txt file, set to noindex in the meta robots tag, or canonicalized to a different page when they should not be. These are very common oversights that negatively impact crawling or indexation.
4. To Test During Development
As updates are made to a development or staging site, an SEO professional must be kept in the loop. Simple template changes could restrict website crawlability, bloat site speed metrics, and create new technical SEO issues. If potential issues or technical roadblocks aren’t discovered early on, they will be more time-consuming and costly to fix post-launch. For example, simple development and platform choices like how to code a hyperlink can result in a completely uncrawlable navigation structure, which will prevent strong indexation and relevance signals, and limit rankings and traffic. Make sure to include an SEO professional with technical SEO expertise who focuses on crawling and indexation barriers.
5. To Test and Consult on Launch Day
If the SEO professional is not brought in until after the site launches, it is already too late. You need your SEO professional standing by at launch, ready to test the 301 redirect implementation, ensure that the appropriate disallows and noindex tags have been removed, submit the new XML sitemap, submit indexation requests, and answer questions or troubleshoot as issues arise.
6. To Troubleshoot and Advise After Launch
After the site launches, monitoring performance and completing a comprehensive post-launch tech audit are absolutely essential. If, for whatever reason, the site is slow to index or page performance declines, an SEO professional will be able to identify any concerns and help rectify them as soon as possible. Not having an SEO professional on hand throughout the planning and development process will make identifying post-launch issues more difficult and time-consuming, risking a longer decrease in site performance for troubleshooting and issue resolution.
A Recipe for Site Migration Planning
An SEO professional should come into a site migration with a clear checklist or plan for both themselves and the other stakeholders. Any migration plan should cover four phases:
1. Planning: URL collection, data benchmarking, consulting on page design and navigation optimization;
2. Staging Testing: 301 redirect mapping, testing crawlability and indexability;
3. Launch Day: 301 redirect implementation testing, plus testing crawlability and indexability post-launch;
4. Post-Launch Testing: Performance monitoring on a daily basis initially, then weekly, and finally subsiding into monthly with a complete technical audit after the first month live.
Just like with all aspects of digital marketing, planning is crucial for a site migration. If your plan doesn’t include a dedicated SEO professional from start to finish, it’s likely to result in unstable or decreased organic search performance after launch.
