SEO Migration
SEO Migration for Successful Site Update
Are you planning a switch to a new domain or another ecommerce platform? Visible Webs will make it smooth.
Site migration is like moving home – the enthusiasm of new beginnings might be tempered by the stress of optimizing logistics. No doubt, this is an exciting step for your company’s journey. But you also need someone to do the heavy lifting for you and make sure nothing goes wrong.
Time and time again, we helped launch brand-new sites with careful consideration to hard-earned SEO. Our team will handle your project of any size and act as guardians during your transition.
What Is SEO Migration?
Site migration is an event when a website undergoes significant alterations (platform, structure, content, design, etc.) and experiences changes in search engine visibility as a result. SEO migration, specifically, refers to moves from one environment to another with SEO in mind. It pimples transferring search engine ranking, indexing signals, authority, and other elements.
Why would a site need to migrate? Here are a few scenarios:
- The current website is outdated, heavy, and poorly functioning
- It’s not responsive or mobile-friendly
- Your company is doing a rebrand, merger, or something else that requires changing servers
In fact, there are plenty of other reasons. The main point is to approach it with due diligence and a proper site migration plan.
Here are examples of when you’d need SEO migration. Let’s say your website was originally built on Magento 2. But as your business grows and scales up, you realize that Shopify SEO migration would suit your needs better (mobile optimization, customer support, ease of use, whatever reason). Or you’re about to open a new store in Germany and want to reach your German customers directly. So, you will move from a general top-level domain to a country code top-level domain (.de).
In either case, you don’t want all your SEO effort to go to waste. At Visible Webs, we don’t believe that losing rankings is inevitable. Leave us a message to keep your search engine visibility and possibly even improve!
Why SEO Should Always Lead Your Website Migration
It’s somewhat unrealistic to expect Google and other search engines to realize the similarities between the old website and the new one. And whose job is it to make search engines notice and accommodate major site changes? Right, an SEO migration service.
Here is why you absolutely need the right person for the migration process.
SEO Specialists Understand Search Engines
Even if you have a digital marketing team, they probably aren’t a jack of all channels. There’s a whole industry dedicated to figuring out search engines, which our team is also committed to. We’ll make sure your new website follows the three pillars of SEO:
- Accessibility
- Relevance
- Authority
We Understand Your Website’s Behavior
You can’t just pick up everything and shove it into a new website. Without understanding your current performance and the factors affecting it, the new site might fail. We’ll create a beautiful, detailed mockup of your website and make sure the one will do justice to it.
We Have the Tracking Tools
The tools we use give us access to historical data and allow us to measure key metrics. Thus, we can make direct performance comparisons – by the end, the numbers will confirm that site collection migration was successful!
We Add the Human Touch
Our common goal is not to create a website just for bots and crawlers. It’s your audience and potential customers who will view your new web pages. So, it’s always good to work with specialists who know what users need and prioritize open communication in the teams and with clients.
We Mitigate Loss
Site migration process can cause traffic losses that no one has control over, but we will make sure you recover. After you migrate, you’ll have some further optimizations to do. Still, it’s much easier to recoup your positions from page two to page one rather than from page ten to page one.
The Risks of Website Migrations and How to Avoid Them
You could be moving your platform to a custom site, a single-page application, WordPress, Shopify, or any number of other services. But if you don’t disregard SEO considerations, expect disruptions, even if you’re using the best CMS in the world with the best user experience tactics.
One of the first things that change during ecommerce site migration is design, ultimately affecting how content is structured and crawled. For example, when you arrange a Shopify website migration from WordPress, most or all your site’s URLs might change, creating SEO risk. If you do a WordPress site migration, you will also experience the exact same problem with canonical tags.
Here is what can happen if you do SEO website migration incorrectly or don’t do it at all:
- Declines in rankings and loss of organic traffic
Solution: mapping out key pages to migrate, URLs for navigation, URLs that need more strength, matching indexable pages. - Lower conversion rate
Solution: event tracking to understand the user flow. - Indexation problems
Solution: looking up indexing status and checking your robots.txt file - Broken internal links
Solution: checking for broken links and planting 301 redirects to their rightful new owner. - Manual actions and unnatural links
Solution: analyzing your existing backlink report and disavowing bad links.
Expert SEO Migration Services by Visible Webs
Our team has expertise and experience in all major ecommerce platforms, including Shopify/Shopify Plus, WordPress, BigCommerce, Magento, and Volusion, making us a perfect vendor for any retailer. Leave us a message today to see your website come out on the other side poised for future success!
Effective business owners and managers know what responsibilities to delegate to accomplish the mission and the goals you set. Your team is probably already wearing many hats during this transition. So, the best solution is to have experienced SEO professionals at Visible Webs leading your SEO.
We’ll take care of various aspects of the website migration process, some of which you wouldn’t even think about:
- We will find the appropriate occasion to make a complete migration. Our goal is to help your business work without noticeable interruptions, so we’ll assess the perfect moment to start.
- You’re guaranteed custom-tailored strategic planning that takes into account all crucial details about your product, business, niche, and industry as a whole.
- We will protect your online authority and visibility as if it were our own.
- Work with a dedicated account manager and get additional support through the whole process.
We also have many clients working with us after we provide the website migration service, so you’re always welcome to check out other offers.
Our Process
We divide the framework for our site migration service into several phases for gradual progress and informed decisions at any point.
- Phase 1. Live Site Audit
We look at your website’s keyword rankings, landing pages, traffic data, and other metrics for the last few months. We can also take note of what should be improved prior to or post-migration, possibly your metadata, on-page copy, alt tags, page load speeds, XML sitemaps, etc. - Phase 2. New Site Audit
When all functionality is complete, content is integrated, and changes are made, we check the new version before it’s live. - Phase 3. Pre-Launch Comparison
Is the content in the right places? Does the metadata match? Are there any broken links? We take a close look at both versions to make sure the newer one is equivalent or better. - Phase 4. QA Migration
At this point, we double- and triple-check if anything got overlooked when an SEO migration was deployed. - Phase 5. Monitoring
If needed, we’ll perform clean-ups and deploy these fixes. We also wait out the traffic dip and evaluate if the recovery/growth goes according to the migration strategy.
Expected Results
When our specialists finish the task, you can get the following results:
- Mitigation of organic traffic loss
On average, there are dips of up to 20% in organic traffic. But our team has proven tactics to make that dip short-lived. Since it’s anticipated, we set realistic expectations and actively work to regain positions after the launch. If we didn’t do anything, the traffic might be easily cut by half and never fully recover. - Growth and expansion of organic search visibility
We view site migration as an opportunity. The new site is not about recreating and mimicking the old version – it can be about retargeting pages for new, more relevant audiences and search queries. We also get the chance to revise key website sections and use migration as tailwinds to boost their performance. - Confidence in a solid SEO foundation
Knowing that you have technical SEO in place and everything else properly planned, you can focus on growth rather than remediation.
Now that we’ve covered the essentials for site migration services, you might be interested in practical steps for implementing SEO solutions. After all, an optimal migration is only possible if you have a clear plan in mind. Our SEO site migration checklist will outline the key considerations for:
- Pre-launch
- Launch day
- Post-launch
