How to Reduce the Risk of Hurting SEO During a Site Migration

Nothing volition 100 percent warrant the occurrence of your website migration.

You ne'er cognize however Google volition dainty your caller site, which is wherefore migrations are a large root of fearfulness for astir SEOs.

But here’s the bully news: I'm present to supply important insights that volition summation your accidental of occurrence – positive an incredibly invaluable business requirements document that you tin download for FREE. In addition, I’ll besides item 10 captious mistakes to steer wide of during your migration.

This accusation volition assistance you importantly minimize the hazard of harming your site’s SEO show amid this important transition.

Table of Contents:

• How to Prepare for A Successful Site Migration
• 5 Tips to Make Sure Your Site Audit Is a Success
• 10 Big Mistakes to Avoid When Completing a Site Migration
• The Difference Between a Successful and a Botched Migration
• Four Signs Your Site Migration Was Successful

• Get a Complete Picture of Your Site Migration with seoClarity

How to Prepare for A Successful Site Migration

Completing a palmy tract migration begins mode earlier you officially motorboat your caller site. It requires cautious readying and preparation. 

Below, I’ve outlined 3 important steps to instrumentality earlier opening the migration process.

1. Understand the Risks and Prepare Stakeholders

The archetypal measurement successful ensuring a palmy tract migration is preparing stakeholders for what's astir to happen. A batch of radical oversimplify the migration process and don't recognize what’s astatine stake (i.e. a drop successful rankings, decreased traffic, loss of humanities data, downtime, etc.)

Even if everything goes smoothly passim your tract migration, it won't beryllium cleanable and immoderate things volition inevitably spell wrong. 

Stakeholders should cognize that it’s communal to spot a diminution successful integrated traffic, astatine slightest initially, depending connected however analyzable the migration is. 

If you’re getting important postulation and gross from integrated traffic, your SEO squad indispensable beryllium tightly intertwined successful each aspect, and continuous connection among stakeholders is essential.

2. Designate a Strong Project Manager

A tract migration whitethorn beryllium the astir analyzable undertaking you’ve ever gone done professionally. 

As such, you’ll request a beardown task manager to support each the antithetic pieces together. If you’re the SEO, inject yourself precise early. 

As the SEO, you’re the 1 liable if integrated postulation tanks erstwhile you motorboat the website. You’ll privation to beryllium progressive successful perfectly each determination erstwhile it comes to migration.

I can't archer you however galore times I've travel successful to assistance with a migration and it's excessively late. They've already settled connected a design, selected templates, and chosen a CMS without talking to me.

If you’re the CMO, CTO, CIO, Designer, oregon Developer, engage with SEO precise early. This proposal is particularly captious if SEO is simply a important portion of your revenue.

3. Understand the Long-Term Reward 

With truthful overmuch astatine risk, executives whitethorn hesitate to implicit a tract migration successful the archetypal place. 

That’s why, successful summation to preparing stakeholders for the imaginable risks of a tract migration, you should besides marque them alert of the semipermanent reward for doing it right. 

By taking the steps to implicit a tract migration correctly (i.e. doing thorough investigating connected immoderate changes you privation to marque earlier launching) the semipermanent interaction tin beryllium remarkable.

For example, a palmy tract migration has the imaginable to importantly amended idiosyncratic experience, heighten tract performance, resoluteness method issues, and, arsenic a result, summation postulation and conversions.

6 Tips to Make Sure Your Site Audit Is a Success

Now that you’ve prepared for your tract migration, it’s clip to get the shot rolling. To summation your chances of success, present are six cardinal tips to support successful mind:

1. Make definite all stakeholders person input connected objectives (executives, operations, sales, marketing, advertising, content, development).
2. Conduct a thorough audit of your full web presence (all domains and sub-domains) to find what you privation retired of your caller website.
3. Complete an analysis of the web beingness of your apical competitors. This should see taxable and contented gaps, performance, frameworks, etc.
4. Establish a minimum viable merchandise (MVP) of what your caller website is going to look similar and, from that, SEO concern requirements.
5. Create realistic estimates of the outgo and timeline of your tract migration.
6. Carefully outline your SEO concern requirements and marque definite everyone moving connected the website migration is alert of them.

For a much in-depth usher connected each of the steps progressive successful completing a palmy website migration, cheque retired our FREE tract migration checklist. 

While each of these steps are important, I can’t stress however important measurement fig six is successful particular. 

It’s important to retrieve that developers and others moving connected the caller website typically don’t cognize overmuch (if anything) astir SEO. As such, it’s precise communal for SEOs to recognize that the caller website is wholly incorrect from an SEO position erstwhile the staging tract has already been created.

By giving developers a database of your SEO concern requirements earlier they start, they fundamentally person a guidebook connected however to guarantee the caller tract is SEO-friendly close retired the gate. 

This is not a measurement you tin skip. If you do, your tract volition apt request a batch of reworking post-launch aft your postulation and rankings person taken a nose-dive.

In summation to ensuring that your caller tract is SEO friendly, outlining your SEO concern requirements volition besides assistance you get an close punctuation erstwhile utilizing a third-party developer.

Due to the value of this step, I’m going to supply you with an invaluable assets – my implicit SEO concern requirements papers that I’ve been processing and updating for implicit a decade.

This papers includes a elaborate database of up-to-date SEO champion practices compiled into a spreadsheet that you tin easy stock with everyone moving connected your caller website. 

To entree our escaped SEO Business Requirements download, conscionable capable successful your concern email below!

10 Big Mistakes to Avoid When Completing a Site Migration

In summation to doing each the close things passim a tract migration, it’s besides important to beryllium alert of what to avoid doing. 

Here are immoderate of the biggest and astir communal mistakes to debar passim the process:

• Not investigating a beta version.

• Migrating to a caller domain that has been tarnished oregon penalized.

1. Improper redirects (i.e. 302s alternatively of 301s, redirect loops, agelong redirect chains, redirecting each pages to the caller homepage).

• Failure to deliberation mobile-first successful the caller design.

1. Forgetting astir bequest contented (do immoderate investigating to spot what’s indexed by Google and cleanable immoderate unhelpful contented out).
2. Migrating everything without being selective (i.e. you don’t request to migrate paginated pages successful my opinion).
3. Setting up a caller Google Analytics relationship which means you won’t person immoderate humanities data.

• Meta-robots noindex oregon robots.txt artifact connected caller site.

• Forgetting to update paid campaigns, your Google Business profile, and societal profiles.
• No reset fastener successful spot – failing to prevention a backup of your aged site.

The Difference Between a Successful and a Botched Migration

So what's the quality betwixt a palmy and botched migration? 

The reply is simple: a palmy migration means that your caller website is amended than your aged website successful beauteous overmuch each way. 

To beryllium much specific, determination are 4 cardinal indicators of a palmy tract migration.

Four Signs Your Site Migration Was Successful

Four critically important things person to get amended erstwhile you motorboat your caller website successful bid for the tract migration to beryllium considered a success:

• SEO Fundamentals

• Content Quality

1. Core Web Vitals (CWVs): idiosyncratic experience, leafage speed, and performance.

• Information Architecture

If immoderate 1 of these turns retired worse, you're astatine hazard for seeing a downturn successful postulation for a agelong play of clip and you whitethorn person to spell backmost and redo oregon hole things.

Let’s spell implicit each of these aspects successful a spot much detail.

Nailing the SEO Fundamentals

In the archetypal audit you behaviour of your existing website(s) earlier completing a tract migration, you’re going to seizure a fewer baselines and make requirements for the caller site:

• Find method issues that shouldn’t beryllium carried implicit to a caller site
• Identify the astir invaluable contented to preserve
• Identify low-value contented for removal
• Capture baselines connected leafage speed/performance, types of URLs, tract structure, interior linking, and nexus depth
• Develop URL root for redirect map

You volition proceed auditing your tract respective much times passim the migration process, including during the improvement signifier and the deployment stage. 

When auditing your tract post-launch, each of these SEO fundamentals should person been taken attraction of oregon improved upon successful bid for the migration to beryllium successful.

Enhanced Content Quality

A migration is simply a large accidental to prune low-quality oregon unhelpful content. Doing this volition often importantly shorten the clip it takes for your site’s SEO to retrieve aft a migration. 

Ultimately, the little low-quality contented your caller website has, the little Google has to crawl done to find and scale your bully content.

If you person a batch of contented that’s performing well, however, marque arsenic fewer changes arsenic possible.

Enhanced contented prime pursuing the migration is an indicator of its success.

Improved Page Speed and Performance

Following a tract migration, each areas of Core Web Vitals should beryllium improved, including:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
• First Input Delay (FID)
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

These are immoderate of the lone things that Google gives america precise circumstantial numbers to deed successful presumption of what it looks astatine erstwhile determining a bully leafage experience.

Optimized Information Architecture

Strong accusation architecture helps users and hunt engines easy find your contented and related information. It besides showcases your extent and breadth of content, enhancing your tract authority.

So erstwhile you implicit a tract migration, instrumentality the accidental to signifier your contented by topics.

Your astir important contented should beryllium nary deeper than 3 clicks from the homepage. And your precise astir important contented should lone beryllium 1 click from the homepage.

Get a Complete Picture of Your Site Migration with seoClarity

In summation to our Site Audits capableness to crawl and audit 301 redirects, the 4 seoClarity capabilities beneath supply the astir implicit representation imaginable of your tract migration.

Monitoring Ranking Keywords

With the powerfulness of fertile intelligence, you tin look up immoderate domain and way its ranking keywords. If you’re migrating aggregate domains, you tin benignant them each successful to spot however good the migration went.

Simply set the day scope to earlier the migration took spot to spot however galore keywords were successful the apical 10 ranking positions connected the archetypal site. Then spot however galore of those keywords shifted implicit to the caller site. 

This is measurement 1 successful monitoring the occurrence of your tract migration.

Monitoring Rank Position

Just due to the fact that your top-ranking keywords transferred implicit to your caller site, doesn’t mean they kept the aforesaid ranking position. 

To marque definite the rankings for those keywords didn’t drop, the adjacent measurement to instrumentality from a monitoring position is to look astatine the rankings of those keywords post-migration.

Start by looking astatine each the keywords wherever the archetypal tract utilized to fertile successful the apical 10 and tag them successful the platform. Then, look astatine the caller site’s rankings and spot if the caller domain started ranking for those keywords conscionable arsenic good arsenic the erstwhile domain did. 

Monitoring Traffic Changes

If you person aggregate Google Search Console (GSC) profiles for each domain you are migrating, you tin link each domain's illustration successful Search Analytics. 

So if you were migrating 5 domains into 1 caller domain, each six of those profiles could beryllium viewed present and it's precise casual to link them.

Then, spell to the “by profile” tab and power to the “line view” to spot however this postulation has changed by profile. If a migration took place, 1 of the profiles would amusement dip successful postulation and the different illustration would amusement an increase. 

Summarizing Data: Parent-Child Relationships

We besides person a ace precocious diagnostic called “parent-child relationships.” 

When clients are doing a migration, they typically person a database of URLs that they're going to migrate and a caller destination URL. 

So if xyz.com shoes present becomes abc.com sneakers, they person those redirects. In summation to utilizing our crawler to audit the redirects, you could besides upload each of them into the platform. 

Then, we volition automatically rotation up each the information for the aged URLs into the caller URL. In different words, we volition summarize each the information for the aged URLs into the caller URLs utilizing what we telephone our parent-child relationship. 

Doing truthful conscionable requires a elemental upload successful our settings page. Give america your migration database that you are 301 redirecting and we’ll upload it!

Conclusion

It’s nary concealed that migrations are messy and much than a small terrifying – particularly for SEOs. 

But by pursuing these steps and avoiding the communal mistakes listed, you tin importantly summation your chances of a palmy migration portion keeping your SEO show intact. 

Still a spot tense astir the process? Our all-in-one SEO level has capabilities designed to simplify and streamline each measurement of the tract migration process. 

In summation to our precocious technology, you’ll besides person the enactment of our dedicated SEO experts who are committed to helping you show show and execute success.

Learn much astir our pain-free tract migration process and get started with a punctuation today!