How To Do A Successful SEO Migration

How To Do A Successful SEO Migration

Website SEO migrations are not anomalies; they’re intrinsic parts of the digital business lifecycle. As technology progresses and corporate goals evolve, changes become necessary, and with these changes come migrations.

It involves a substantial change to a website’s technology, structure, design, or location to enhance online visibility. Each type of migration carries a certain level of risk, and when you begin to stack different migration types (and change more variables), the risks don’t stack; they begin to amplify.

Some of the most common migrations include:

• Restructuring URLs
• Changing protocol (HTTP to HTTPS)
• Changing hosting providers
• Moving to a new platform
• Changing domain names
• Merging multiple domain properties

Why do a site migration?

Businesses and website owners are embarking on site migrations. Here are the major reasons:

• Changes in technology include the integration of platforms like Shopify and WordPress.
• Site location involves changing the location of your site from one domain to another, merging two websites, redirecting a website, geo-redirects, rebranding, etc.
• Redesigning involves minor and major redesigns, where the design is changed end-to-end. Further, creating a separate website for mobile or creating different websites for different types of visitors based on their location.
• Restructuring involves website structure and hierarchy-related changes like navigational tweaks, moving internal pages and posts, changing URL structure, etc.
• Content changes is a rapidly growing website migration type where you have to update, merge, or remove content.
• Hosting company switch involves migrating the website to the new host.

SEO Migration Risk Mitigation

Redirects

Redirects are part of almost all migrations. They serve as navigational guides for both browsers and search engines, providing information about a webpage’s location based on a given URL, representing coded instructions that are assigned to specific URLs, or a set of them. For migrations where URLs change, Google has stated it can take up to 180 days for the value to fully pass from A to B.

JSS, CSS, Parameters & Media Files Not Redirected

While carrying out migration, people focus on redirecting the URLs as those are what rank, but you should also be looking at redirecting your JS files, CSS, Parameter URLs, and media files (images, videos) if needed. Redirecting images: Google has recommended that you redirect image URLs.

Environment Changes

Migrating to a new platform involves redesigning templates or updating the site structure. Do ensure that the new “environment” mirrors the SEO qualities of the previous, at a minimum. Oftentimes, the new platform goes live, and a lot of content is hidden behind JavaScript expandable areas, and with NoScript or JS disabled, it remains hidden, or other key elements are missed.

For auditing a new environment, do check:

• Metadata carried over correctly
• Structured data has been implemented and is validated
• Canonicals are correct
• Pagination markup is correct
• Internal linking has been carried over and points to 200 URLs
• XML and HTML sitemaps are present
• Hreflang is set up correctly (if you’re an international website)
• Redirects have been tested
• 404 page returns a 404 response code

Pitfalls in Migrations

• Incorrect SEO strategy or unclear objectives.
• Poor planning and scoping of resources and timeline.
• Unforeseen UX or design changes that impact content or code.
• Involving the SEO agency too late or after key decisions have already been set in stone.
• Poor or lack of sufficient testing.
• Slow responses and low development priority to post-migration bug fixes.
• Uncontrollable variables (e.g., Google update)

Poor strategy comes from the business. Sometimes, stakeholders create plans for how the website, brand, and wider strategy will move forward. Still, the business strategy (and expectations) don’t align with the proposed timelines or what is technically feasible.

Early planning and devising a scope helps in avoiding delay by setting expectations of how long SEO processes and tasks take. It can also identify potential obstacles like public holidays or peak sales periods. However, for example, as an online retailer, not launching a website in the days running up to Thanksgiving, as major bugs could jeoparadize your Black Friday/Cyber Week/Christmas period.

SEO migrations don’t happen overnight. But, SEO support is oftentimes sought too late down the roadmap, with many critical decisions made beforehand that impact organic search performance.

Slow development response time is not something SEO professionals can control. It is an issue with the business itself. More often than not, this isn’t the developer’s fault but more a symptom of poor planning from decision-making stakeholders.

Uncontrollable variables. Despite the best planning and resource allocation, getting sideswiped by something unforeseen and completely unavoidable, like a Google update or the CDN/DNS suffering an outage. For instance, in August 2020, when caffeine broke, new URLs weren’t being indexed.

Ineffective communications with stakeholder involves issues related to communication, and the expectation level of indirect stakeholders, which is typically VPs and the C-suite.