Website migrations provide brands with a brand-spanking new home on the internet, either at a new location or with new additions to improve the website's functionality, design or UX. These substantial changes are great at face value, but can have a significant impact on search engine visibility if not done correctly.
Migrations can often go wrong, especially when there are three variations of migration that may be happening at any time. Whether a business is moving to a new platform (for example, moving from Wordpress to Magento), moving to a new hosting provider, or moving to a new domain name.
Considerations need to be around link redirects, both existing and new, URL structure, pre-migration tests, duplicate content and more. There's a lot to have to think about - which is why it's so easy that something can go wrong.
Before we started to work with 4gadgets, they had experienced post migration performance loss that led to a decrease in their average ranking position and a significant sessions performance drop of -59%.
The migration mishap had also resulted in a number of other challenges, such as a high volume of redirected pages and broken links. As well as this, the large number of products on the website caused issues related to duplicate content and had a negative impact on site speed.
Utilising our integrated organic team across Content, SEO and Digital PR specialisms was key in fixing this performance problem.
To help them recover from the migration, we initially assessed a range of technical elements, including their sitemaps and indexation, before proceeding to rectify any linking issues.
Following this, our efforts turned to enhancing performance by optimising core pages, tackling issues such as duplicate content and slow site speed, as well as exploring opportunities in structured data to further enhance performance.
Through our approach, we were able to boost organic sessions by +72.8%, which ended up surpassing pre-migration levels of traffic to the 4gadgets website.
Alongside this, during our efforts, we achieved the best average keyword position that the website had seen across the last 16 months, with a number of tracked keywords also performing well across Product Details Pages.
Find out how you too can recover from migration mishaps with the help of our integrated organic approach, or avoid these issues by having us assist with your migration. Talk to us about our integrated strategy and ideation consultancy, or get in touch with us below.