When it comes to SEO, the Website migration is not an easy operation that can be completed quickly.
Launching the website involves tough research, planning, execution, and monitoring. The migration of a website demands inputs from every team, including web development, digital marketing, and SEO to make sure that the migration work is done effectively and efficiently.
The main purpose of SEO Migration is to prevent the loss of your website traffic, conversations, and search engine rankings.
To maintain and increase the organic performance of the website, it is suggested to perform SEO website Migration. And, to make it possible, there are various Website Migration Guides that are available on the internet to assist you when you are stuck somewhere.
What is Website Migration?
Website Migration refers to a change in URL. A change to your website could affect the site’s visibility on different search engines; these changes can be small or big like updating layouts to URL structure or moving your website to a new domain.
Different Types of Website Migrations
- Change in Web Protocol
- Sub Domain
- Main Domain
- Content Managing System
- Redesigning
- Combination
What is SEO Migration?
The process of transferring authority, indexing signals, and search engine rankings and showing the major changes in URL structure is called SEO Migration.
It ensures that you will not lose search engine visibility while performing the migration. To avoid the risk of losing your search engine rankings, traffic, and different leads, the need for SEO in the website migration is very important.
Time and Cost Consumed by SEO Migration
The consumption of the migrating time is based on how much content you are moving. The fewer the website pages, the less it will take time to migrate. For example, migrating 100 pages of a website is far easier than migrating 1000 pages of a website, similarly migrating 10 pages is easier than migrating 100 pages of a website.
Sometimes, some migrations take three months to execute, some take only a month. It is advised to take the proper time to make things work out, but as always it depends on your team’s resources.
Even the cost of the migration is based on the size of the project. It varies, what kind of migration you are doing, and how much content you need to migrate and develop.
Checklist – SEO Migration
The provided checklist items can be applied for the successful migration of a website.
However, migration depends on how much time you need for execution. In case you are not able to do proper migration of your website, you can consult or hire an eCommerce SEO professional to make your website run properly.
Migration Date
Picking up a migration date will set a deadline for the team so that the work can be done by that time only. In that period, make sure to set your project goals, redesigns, content, and work design.
The website migration can be done when the engagement is low and make sure to stay away from the weekends which can create communication and coordination issues. Try to launch the website in the afternoon or in the early evenings when the traffic is low.
Site Backup
It is advised to have a backup of your site. By chance, the launch might not go as planned, you would not be losing your work. Discuss it with your website development team to resolve the issues occurring in site migration.
Create a Duplicate Website
Creating a duplicate website helps in testing the changes that you are going to do in your live site.
By working on the duplicate website, it’ll provide you ample time to check issues on your website, so that in the future while running the actual website, the website will run smoothly.
Moving Sections of the Site
Despite moving files in bulk, try to move your files one by one, which makes the strategy more manageable and easy.
Have a Check on Domain health and Backlink Audit for the new Domain
If you are planning to move your site to a new domain, first check the organic health of the new domain. Also, check if the current backlink is relevant or not.
You can use various tools to check whether the content held by the domain is relevant or not.
Implement Redirects
Implement 301 redirects for your website, create a full map based on your SEO migration score sheet, and implement them on your website. It will help in redirecting the old URL to a new URL and also redirects the internal links properly in case you missed them.
Update your Internal Links
It is suggested to update your internal links, as it avoids broken pages or internal redirects.
Perform Pre- and Post-Launch Audit
Before and after launching the website, conduct an SEO audit to check all the issues and to confirm whether everything is working properly on not.
You can check various things like:
- Crawl Run
- Analytics Check
- Mobile Testing
- Working of Integration
- Social Media Update
- Business and Places Update
- Broken Links checking
Checking of Performance After Launch
The performance of the website is important after launching the website, ensure that every page and link is working properly. Check on Google Analytics for a month to see the performance of the website.
You can check a few things:
- Performance Ranking
- Organic Traffic
- Crawling of the Site
- Backlink Profile
Tracking 404 Pages
Try to find out 404 pages on the website and optimize it, so that whenever a user encounters a broken page, they will land on a page that tells them that the page doesn’t exist anymore.
The optimization helps to redirect the users to similar content on other websites.
CONCLUSION
Migration of a website is not an easy and simple task. It includes hard work, dedication, time, and various resources to run a website live properly.
You have to look at different factors to maintain the organic visibility of the website post-launch.
In case you face any problem regarding the migration of the website, you are suggested to work with hire eCommerce SEO professionals.
