How to Protect SEO Performance During a Site Migration

Arming yourself with the right tools to ensure a smooth site migration is important - find out how to protect your SEO during a migration today.

Protect Your SEO During A Site Migration

If you are planning a site migration this year as a means to evolving your business online, then arming yourself with the right tools to ensure a smooth migration is important.

From an organic performance perspective, safeguarding your SEO during a migration is crucial, yet it is often overlooked in the planning process.

Knowing how to identify and prioritise pages that present risks upon relaunch, as well as understanding what happens if you don't move specific pages and successfully protect backlinks are also all integral things to consider.

Your search visibility and traffic moving with you are important too, as well as the tools you are using to measure the success of the migration and other key SEO metrics.

Why It's Important to Consider SEO in a Site Migration

If you're opening a new physical store, you're going to make sure that there's a lot of footfall while you're undergoing the opening process. Remaining visible to your customers is vital, and it's no different with a website. When you launch a new website, you want to ensure that customers or users can still find you!

Organic is widely considered one of the largest sources of traffic to websites, so it's important to get this right. If you fail to do so, you risk leaving your website stranded on a search-less island where nobody can find you, which can create a huge short-term issue in a lack of leads and revenue. This can also have a long-term impact too, in the time it takes to recover from a botched SEO migration.

All too often SEO is a concern for later on in the process, causing the revisiting of old tasks, the duplication of work and the loss of time, resources and money in the long run. Migrations are highly pressurised situations, and such large projects can be stressful - considering SEO from the beginning of the process can help to mitigate risk and reduce stress.

Small Things With Big Impacts on Organic Visibility

Two things that are seemingly small that can have major impacts on organic visibility that are often not considered are the robots.txt file and canonical links. 

Robots.txt

A small line of code can prevent a search engine from crawling the entire website, and that can have a detrimental impact on organic performance.

It's an easy thing to check for - but if the code is left there for even just a day or too, there could be a major impact.

Canonical Links

Canonical links allow you to identify the preferred version of a web page - much like a soft 301 redirect. Canonical URLs often point toward the new website and upon launch the new website isn't accessible to Google.

A small piece of code in the page's source code can have a huge impact, telling the search engine that you prefer one page to another - but they can't crawl it. 

The Site Migration SEO Checklist

Naturally, there are plenty of SEO site migration horror stories and we ideally want to avoid all of the issues plaguing them. No more frustration, no more date pushing and no more eating up time and money. 

From planning to post-launch, there's a lot to consider when undergoing a site migration - but we're here to help you with our site migration checklist.

The Site Migration Planning Phase

Including SEO in the planning stage is crucial. Creating a web development specification document as a guide for developers is SEO best practice, and provides the developers with things like URL formatting, how to set up canonical links, pagination set up, page tags, the site map and much more. This improves efficiency, allowing Google and other relevant crawlers to do their job as quickly as possible. 

Wondering how to create a specification document? Get in touch with us to see one we've created.

It's also key to know how the current website is performing and how successful an SEO migration could be. By putting together a spreadsheet in the planning phase, we can look at a range of performance metrics, such as sessions, conversions, revenue, organic rankings and high performing pages, and gain an idea of how the website is performing overall. This is also useful to use to reflect and see how successful the migration was. 

Pulling together a secondary spreadsheet to prioritise pages is also important during the planning stage. Looking at which pages would pose a risk to remove, which are high-performers and then those which offer little-to-no value. Older pages that aren't ranking, don't have backlinks and have no performance value are prime to remove in a migration. 

Plan an audit for your current website too, as you can iron out any present issues before you end up moving those across with your migration.

The Site Migration Developmental Phase

This is the nitty gritty of an SEO site migration. One of the first things to consider is mapping URLs as it is one of the easiest things to get wrong. All old URLs need to point to the most relevant new URL on the new website - and that doesn't necessarily mean the homepage. Bulk redirects to the homepage are more often than not seen as software overhauls, so it's a risky thing to do. Collate a list of all current URLs and map them to a new, relevant page.

As part of this, working out which keywords new URLs are targeting is vital. Looking at your current website and knowing which keywords provide value and generate traffic, as well as doing extra research to identify future opportunities is important.

Don't forget about backlinks either. Best practice is to ensure that you are only linked to by beneficial websites and not sites considered to be 'broken' or 'spam'. This is a great time to audit your backlinks and use Google's guidelines to classify them as good or bad links, producing a disavow file for the bad ones and uploading it to Google Search Console before launch.

The Site Migration Testing Phase

The migration has been planned. The development has started. The website has been built. Now, we're on to the testing phase.

A crucial part at this stage is a technical audit of the staging site. From an SEO perspective there are a number of elements to consider here, and at ClickThrough we cover up to 40 different elements. Any significant issues that need fixing prior to launch will be found here.

Structured data carry over is a necessity, too. While certain search results are less relevant than they used to be, structured data can help you to get seen earlier and more often in a consumer's search. It's also a prime opportunity to implement further types of structured data too.

The Site Migration Launch Phase

While launch can be a stressful time, it's also very important. It's key to figure out if the website can be found and crawled and that should be the first thing that is checked. Following that, it's on to checking the 301 redirects, allowing any issues to be rectified quickly.

Head to Google Search Console too, and let them know you've changed domains. Submitting your XML sitemap to them can speed up the process of them crawling your website, offering direct access to the most important pages from your point of view.

The Site Migration Post-Launch Phase

There are a few post-launch considerations to ensure that everything you've changed or implemented has worked.

• Checking all of your changes have worked and that there are no outstanding or new issues with a technical SEO audit.
• Ensuring there are no duplicate URLS, checking all important pages are in the sitemap, fixing issues flagged from a full sitemap audit.
• Checking for negatively impacting backlinks and disavowing them, and pointing important backlinks to the new website following a backlink audit.
• Monitoring performance closely over the first three months post-launch.

Perform An SEO-Friendly Site Migration

Thinking of migrating your website and want to ensure SEO has been considered at every stage? Looking to upgrade but want to ensure that UX and Core Web Vitals are all up to scratch? Then you're in the right place!

We offer SEO Migration Consultancy, which provides expert support across every stage of your migration. We're also able to offer migration recovery strategies if you've made a few mistakes along an already complete process and your organic performance has suffered. 

Book in a call with one of our SEO experts today to get your migration underway.