Migrating your website doesn’t have to mean risking your rankings and the revenue that they bring. Whether you’re rebranding, switching to a different CMS, or doing a complete overhaul of your website, there are ways to do it without putting your best marketing channel in danger.
In fact, when migrations are done well, it’s not uncommon to see a significant improvement in rankings a few months after the process is complete. As someone who has bought and sold over $2M worth of websites, I’ve learnt many lessons the hard way.
While migrating sites from web host to web host, changing domain names, redeveloping themes, or switching them from a custom platform to something simpler like WordPress, I’ve gained a wealth of knowledge that is difficult to duplicate from reading a few blog posts and watching a video or two.
Moreover, my background in web development and a decade of experience as an independent SEO consultant allows me to confidently deal with all kinds of migration-related tasks. Unforeseen issues and course corrections are simple enough to handle.
If a recent re-platform has hurt your rankings or if you wish to migrate your site the right way, I can help.
SEO Website Migration In a Nutshell
Migration projects involve complex processes on the development, UX, content, and SEO side of things. The latter entails changing your domain, moving to a new hosting platform, shifting from HTTP to HTTPS, or switching to a different content management system.
Not all migration plans are the same. Some may involve a complete redesign of your old website, while others have more to do with site structure and internal linking.
Here are some real-world applications where a site migration may be in order:
- You want to introduce e-commerce functionality to your website and shift the existing blog content away from the home page.
- You’re expanding to new geographic markets and need to change to a .com domain while also replicating your content using multilingual SEO.
- You’re merging two websites or multiple subdomains, particularly on legacy sites.
- You want to update your sitewide URL structure and consolidate old redirects as well as old content.
Without careful consideration of your SEO strategy, the migration can have a devastating effect on how well search engines can crawl, index and ultimately, rank your site.
How Migrations Affect SEO
Organic search listings are fuelled by ranking factors that search engines use to gauge the user-friendliness and relevance of your website.
If the migration plan happens to be overly complex or invasive, hundreds of ranking factors can be affected. For search engines to catch on and “understand” your website, you need to let them know about the changes you’ve made.
In best-case scenarios, these changes will be understood in due course, but this process is rarely fast. In worse case scenarios, search engines will never understand the changes and your past marketing assets will be lost.
If you don’t want to start again at 0, and want Google to understand the changes quickly, you need to consider factors such as:
- URL structure: Changes in URL paths can lead to broken links and loss of page authority if not properly redirected.
- 301 redirects: Properly setting up 301 redirects is crucial to maintain link equity and prevent loss of traffic.
- Metadata: Title tags, meta descriptions, and other metadata need to be carried over to relate to content on the existing site.
- Canonical tags: These ensure that search engines index the correct version of your pages.
- Internal linking: Must be updated to reflect the new URLs to enable crawlers to discover all of your content, as well as maintain link equity within the site. Even simple theme changes and pagination can negatively impact internal linking.
- Sitemap and robots.txt: These files need to be updated to help search engines to quickly discover new content and avoid crawling issues.
- Schema markup: Implementing or updating schema helps search engines understand your site content post-migration.
- Search console settings: Must be updated to reflect the new domain or URL paths, including resubmitting sitemaps and monitoring for crawl errors.
Of these, 1 and 2 are high risk because URLs carry value. Your website may have hundreds or thousands of URLs that have built up equity, traffic, and authority over time. Without a good migration strategy, all of that could be lost.
That’s because when you change a URL, search engines consider it a new page unless proper redirects are set up. These help to transfer value from the old URL to the new one, ensuring that rankings and traffic are preserved.
Without proper redirects, you may lose rankings because search engines have to re-crawl and re-index the new URLs as if they were new.
It’s not uncommon for websites to shoot themselves in the foot by not preserving legacy URLs during a migration. This not only dilutes their SEO strength but also creates redundancies that snowball into larger, more complex problems with time.
I’ve seen and mitigated my fair share of site migration disasters over the years. Some of these take months and even years to fix as they involve merging subdomains and satellite websites back into a single core URL to rebuild website strength.
Seamless Migration, Uninterrupted Success
Looking into the workings of an old website can be a lot like decluttering a hoarder’s attic. It may be a trainwreck, full of abandoned strategies, duplicate pages, broken links, and rogue code, but I see it as a heap of opportunities with many quick and not-so-quick wins.
As someone who’s obsessed with investing in websites, I’ve done due diligence on hundreds of them over the last decade. When buying, I’m always looking for some sort of unfair advantage which could allow me to flip the website for a profit.
This out-of-the-box thinking gives me an edge over the competition, but more importantly, helps me to consider migrations from all angles for my clients when I’m engaged as a consultant.
My migration consulting service involves thorough preparation, getting involved with all stakeholders to ensure we’re all on the same page, and careful attention to the technical elements of both your new and old websites, so we’re confident that the changes line up correctly.
The work doesn’t stop once you’ve pushed from staging to live. I’ll be an ongoing resource for your team to speak with, monitoring crawl stats, indexation and rankings on a daily basis for the weeks and months that follow.
I’ll work with your team to ensure a smooth and stress-free transition that will keep your site structure and organic rankings as stable as possible, as well as prepare you for growth in the years to come.
If you’re ready to work with someone who doesn’t shy away from difficult projects and has your best interests in mind, get in touch with me today. Let’s discuss your plan and see if we’re a good fit.