A SEO migration is certainly one of the most delicate SEO practices to perform for yourself or your customer. In our experience, it is also one of the most requested services of the moment: probably because many important brands of various sectors – from fashion to finance – changed their website in the last years without considering the criticalities regarding redirects and their necessary implementation from the SEO point of view. The consequences? They immediately lost all of the accumulated trust and online visibility, together with a considerable slice of traffic: clearly, this has a strong impact on revenue.
What is a SEO migration?
A migration involves all of the following cases when changing your website:
- If you switch domain, going from mywebsite.net to www.mywebsite.com, or going from http to https;
- If you keep the domain by implementing a “simple” restyling of the site, whether it’s structural or graphic;
- If you switch from a mobile version (m.) to a responsive version;
- If you decide to change layout and to remove “simple” links from the homepage;
- If you change platform/CMS (for example, going from Joomla to WordPress).
To be fair, nothing is simple in these processes. You cannot implement changes of any kind without experiencing a hit in SERP visibility and traffic. But there is a way to preserve traffic, trust and ranking: you will have to perform an accurate redirect operation.
Page authority: the importance of a redirect strategy
First of all, let’s define what page authority is: it is the authoritativeness that every page acquires in time, thanks to links that it receives from other web pages (regardless of them being internal or external to the domain). Of course, if an old web page receives a certain number of links, those links will be lost when you switch to the new version of the same, because they won’t point to their original destination but to a 404 error (page not found).
Is this an irreversible loss? No, not at all: you just need to implement accurate and permanent redirects (301) that indicate the transition from old page to new page. In this way, all of the trust gathered from links will find its way to the new landing page.
Imagine trust to be a liquid and that you had to pour it from one cup (old page) to another (new page) without spilling a single drop. If the second cup is not there – or if we do not know where it is – we would spill all the liquid and waste it.
What must be migrated?
This is a phase where being methodical and careful to details is fundamental.
Essere sistematici e attenti al dettaglio è fondamentale in questa fase. Redirects aside, here is a brief overview of the elements that should always be migrated:
For each page:
- Title tag, fundamental in SEO perspective – without it you risk massive rank loss; Description, while it does not influence ranking, it surely influences CTR;
- Content – do we really have to repeat how important content is for Google?
Once for the whole website:
- HTACCESS, the file that provides important instructions to the server;
- txt, useful to instruct crawlers on the important content of your website;
- Codes and web analysis files – you should remember to migrate these to monitor criticalities following the migration;
- xml, no need to comment on this;
Page-wise, the priority should be given to those that have the most backlinks, organic traffic, and better ranking. Following are categories, subcategories, product and brand pages.
To summarize, the golden rule is that all URLs of the previous domain must be redirected (through a 301 redirect) towards their new corresponding URL.
Possible issues when migrating
- Server change, this does not require a redirect because you “physically” move the data from a machine to another. This can, however, influence page load times (check performances on PageSpeed);
- Redirect chains – shorten them, as Google does not transfer trust after the 4th redirect;
- 404 pages – customize them not for technical reasons, but for the user’s sake. A lackluster “not found” page can have negative impact on traffic.
Phases and timing of a good SEO migration
When and how should we perform the activities that we mentioned above?
First, it is good to plan ahead and find a suitable time window to perform your migration: a “protected” time frame, where your business is safe, where the web traffic is physiologically lower due to your industry’s seasonality. For example, an e-commerce focused on beachwear should decide to migrate during the autumn/winter, surely not in a relevant period like May-September.
At this point, you should divide your activity in three phases:
Pre-migration – it is the most delicate phase and includes mapping of the existing URLs, the structure of the new URLs, the creation of redirect rules, performance analyses, creation of new Sitemap.xml, content comparison between the new website and the previous version, layout, heading and meta tag analyses.
Migration – it includes the check for 301 and 302 redirects, of crawl errors, of error messages in Search Console, of the Sitemap.xml (broken links) and robots.txt, the detection of missing or partially migrated titles or descriptions, the presence of Analytics tracking code on every page, performance analyses and comparison with the previous results, the presence of duplicate content and the possible presence of “noindex” in the pages of our website.
Post-migration – this is a control phase. Its core is index and ranking monitoring, control over Google’s cache and performances on Search Console, PadeSpeed and Yslow (and similar).
For further information or if you are planning to migrate your website…contact us for an ad-hoc SEO strategy.