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An old, outdated website isn’t a good representation of your brand, especially if you were hoping to remain competitive and authoritative in your industry. Nevertheless, even the best products and services can accomplish opportunities within their field with a simple website facelift. So, if it’s about time for a re-skin and you’re worried about site migration and how it will harm your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, we’re here to offer some advice.
What is a site migration?
The term site migration refers to the process by which a website gets largely revamped in areas that impact its visibility on search engines. Generally speaking, these areas include the website’s design, its user experience, the platform, the location, and the overall structure. The end result will likely be a cleaner interface, an improved user experience, and quicker functionality.
That being said, while there are many benefits to an updated website, if the migration is executed poorly, you may end up with status code errors, a negative SEO performance, and some annoyed website visitors. So, how do you prepare to ensure that your site’s migration doesn’t harm important elements like SEO?
What should you do to ensure the migration goes smoothly?
There are many reasons that you may need a site migration or redesign which could include a website location server change or a simple change in the domain name. Whatever the circumstances, leave yourself time to prepare and execute the migration professionally.
What can you expect from SEO services in Vancouver and beyond pre-migration?
- Crawling of the existing site: This part of the service is retrieving URLs and markup of the site to assist in future mapping.
- Recording benchmarks: Sometimes, analytics data will get erased during migration, so it’s valuable to take the precautions to retain it before there are any changes to navigation, architecture, or design of the site.
- Mapping the URLs: This includes elements like redirections, which from a usability standpoint, assist users greatly in landing on the appropriate page instead of receiving an error on their screen. From an SEO perspective, you don’t want to lose all the history, backlinks, and old page build-ups that have been telling Google where to appear.
- Titles, meta descriptions, and HTML markups will be retained: The information that made up the bulk of your website’s content will be lost or look different post-migration if it’s not organized beforehand.
What can you expect from SEO services in Vancouver and beyond the day of migration?
- The preparation of your site’s DNS settings: Moving to a new server involves coordination with your web team and hosting provider to ensure the site’s new location is set up correctly.
- Launch: The setup of forwarding redirects, unpublishing old content, and implementing new must be done quickly and efficiently will the site is momentarily down.
- Crawl the new site: As soon as the launch is complete, a crawl must be done to ensure that migration happened as expected with the proper indexability and crawlability.
- Identify and fix missing or duplicate content: Both missing and duplicate content affect your SEO, so a crawl report must be done to fix these issues.
- Update Google Analytics and Google Search Console: This will avoid gaps in data and reporting to make sure things are running properly.
- Submit sitemaps: Your XML site map needs to be updated to ensure there are no errors.
What can you expect from SEO services in Vancouver and beyond post-migration?
- Performance monitoring: Your site will experience a temporary dip in traffic after a migration, which means it’s important to monitor the analytics to ensure there is nothing else affecting performance.
- Site audit: Any issues affecting your site’s performance can be found using a third-party site audit tool.
- Update your platform: Any ads that are running on your old platform will need fresh links to bring shoppers to the right place.
- Update backlinks: If you have any third-party publishers, you must reach out to them and ask them to swap to your latest things to ensure that your existing SEO efforts will continue from these high-value websites.
What did you learn about website migration and SEO? Drop a comment below to share with our readers.
Alex Wilks has been working as a copywriter and digital marketing strategist since 2018, with added specialties in social media and email marketing. With a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and Communication, she is a natural content writer with the ability to connect well with her target audience.