SEO Strategy During Your Website Migration

Everything digital is subjected to change. With the development of new technologies and increased demand, digital platforms, especially those businesses require a change in various stages.

Website migration is one such remarkable phase every website should go through at least once or at different points of time to adapt to demands, necessities or meeting new goals.

While website migration is great in order to be updated with trends and improving your website or business, on the whole, it is a fiddly affair.

Website migration involves some complex steps that can become hectic for all the teams involved in the digital marketing of a brand or a business.

From the creative aspect to high-end technical requirements, every aspect of your website has to be considered and ignoring any of it could lead to damage to your business.

Once, the migration is done and you enter a new domain or a complete transformation, it will be too late and things can get out of hand. But when done right, you win and nothing can stop you. So what do you do to get it right? Consider the most possible threat.

Yes! But, do you know what is going to affect you much? It is without a doubt, the traffic.

In fact, businesses become apprehensive about a possible decrease in traffic or completely losing it. And all you have to do is, design a solid SEO strategy.

A good SEO strategy during website migration includes all the aspects that could possibly alter the existing traffic. Here’s a list of aspects that you cannot afford to ignore while designing your SEO strategy.

Remember to Save the Data

Be it URLs or metadata of the previous site; remember to document and save them in the first place. This documentation at the beginning of the migration process helps you have detailed information about the past performance of your site, traffic, including all the values and your Google rankings.

This will help you track and compare the performance of your site once the migration is done. Any errors or discrepancies can be easily found with the available data.

It also applies to your old posts or pictures that are filled with keywords that helped you drive the traffic. Though all the old content seems like a burden and you do not want to take to your new site, archive them and keep or keep them handy.

Balance Crawlers

Though crawlers account for Google ranking and increase your website visibility, crawlers, when your new website is still under construction, read incomplete content and this can lead misinterpretation of your site. Eventually, your site’s ranking falls even before the migration is done.

But once the migration process is completed, crawlers come into play again. This time they read through the content and find errors or threats that might affect your site severely. This is a kind of a follow-up every business needs to adopt in order to look for SEO issues and find solutions at the earliest.

Redirecting Is The Key

Proper redirecting helps you keeping up the number of visitors. Visitors can get really frustrated and confused if there are any broken links or unresponsive pages.

How to tackle this? Mapping. Yes, mapping of old URLs to the new and appropriate URLs when carefully done can avoid such disturbances. Use 301 redirecting to maximize the success rate.

Keep a record of all the URLs and see if matching is done correctly. Getting this right can reduce the risk of losing your visitors.

Another important step here is, creating 404 pages. The purpose of 404 pages is to make your customers aware of the error with a short message or link to further information. This is to ensure that your visitors do not lose their cool and get annoyed.

Give Backlinks a Front Seat

A perfect SEO strategy during website migration means covering everything. Backlinks are greatly responsible for your website traffic. There is a chance of losing a great amount of data if links are not claimed and backlinks are not renewed.

First, jot down the list of backlinks that your website holds. And then look for those that are extremely important. This means selecting backlinks that are associated with highly valued and famous websites.

But the real task comes only after identifying the backlinks. Send detailed requests to those site owners requesting a change of link. Links once changed or updated in those busy sites help you maintain the SEO value.

Let Google Know

This means you have to update your information on Google Search Console. This has two uses. Firstly, you can register your new domain and update new URLs on Google Search Console.

After the update is done, you can use Google Search Console to know everything related to your SEO. Yes. This tool helps you to know the performance of your website and get a detailed list of various metrics, issue notifications.

You can use your benchmarked data of the previous site and compare them to track the status of your website.

Do Not Ignore Social Media Platforms

If not social media platforms, what else contribute a lot to getting active visitors and customers? So it is important to make sure that you clear all the old URLs and update the new ones.

This is especially vital while posting ads after migration. If your new URLs do not match the existing ones, your ads will be removed. Also, make sure you redesign your paid ad campaigns depending on the changes that you have made during migration.

Most importantly, let your customers and visitors know that your website is under construction and keep them updated from time to time. By doing this, you can avoid any SEO value loss.

This list should help you in making your website migration process smooth and trouble-free. Apart from looking at these necessary aspects, businesses need coordination.

A proper and constant interaction between the SEO teams and various other teams to understand the SEO needs that contribute a lot to driving traffic and keeping your business move with a standard pace.