SEO Migration

An SEO migration is the process of moving a website from one domain, platform, or design to another while preserving its existing search engine rankings, traffic, and overall visibility. This process also includes transferring search engine ranking, authority and indexing signals. SEO migration can involve various elements, including technical and content-related changes, so it is essential to have a well-planned strategy in place to ensure that the migration goes smoothly.

SEO can often require a lot of time and energy to generate results, so you don’t want to waste all of the benefits of your hard work when migrating websites. At Reform Digital, we have extensive experience in SEO migrations and can help you plan and execute a successful migration that preserves your search engine rankings, traffic, and overall online visibility. Whether you are moving to a new domain, redesigning your website, or switching to a new platform, we’ve got you covered.

SEO migration can involve various elements, including technical and content-related changes, so it is essential to have a well-planned strategy in place to ensure that the migration goes smoothly.

Here are 4 key elements that are involved during an SEO migration:

• Technical considerations: 

The technical aspects of your website, such as the site structure, URL structure, sitemap, and server configuration, need to be considered during the migration process to avoid any negative impacts on your search engine rankings.

• Content migration: 

The content on your website needs to be migrated carefully to ensure that all the relevant pages are transferred to the new site and that all content makes it onto the correct pages on the new platform, including meta tags.

• URL redirects: 

Redirects are essential to preserve the link equity of your website and maintain the rankings of your pages. Content migration should be done in a way that doesn’t affect your site’s traffic and maintains your rankings and backlinks. This involves setting up 3xx redirects from the old URLs to the new URLs so that search engines and users can find your new pages easily.

• Post-migration monitoring: 

After the migration, it is important to monitor your website’s rankings and traffic to identify any potential issues and take corrective actions if necessary.

An SEO Migration is a planned and very particular process that requires a deep level of understanding and organisation and auditing before undertaking. Whether the migration is moving to a new CMS, migrating a large amount of new content or any other reason, you need to walk through some of the important pre-launch and post-launch steps.

Things to remember before migrating:

• Set up a test environment and sure that access is blocked from all crawlers
• Create a keyword and page strategy
• Create new pages with a clear site structure in mind
• Review all internal linking and link rendering
• Create a backup of the site’s metadata and content
• Create a 3xx redirect map

What to do after a migration is complete:

• Run a technical audit to make sure that all site blockers have been removed
• Test and review all site redirects
• Configure analytics and submit your site so search console for indexing 
• Test new XML sitemap
• Monitor site performance

Reform Digital offers a complete SEO migration service. Our team has a technical background and brings this expertise to your migration. They follow a detailed method, communicate SEO requirements, and work directly with your developer to ensure a smooth migration. Communicating with you every step of the way, we can help you:

• move to a new framework or CMS
• change your domain name
• change from HTTP to HTTPS
• move to a new server
• implement a ccTLD change
• add a mobile version of your website

Every website is different and although there is no specific time to migrate your website, you would want to migrate it before it starts to break. Some websites become outdated and experience problems in the backend that could lead to poor user experience for your customers along with a difficult time using the platform for you and your staff on the backend.

Before the problems get out of hand, it is about time you look into investing in an upgrade of platforms and this is normally the appropriate time to consider a site migration. 

If you are planning to redesign your website, it is essential to consider the potential impact on your search engine rankings and traffic. A well-executed website redesign can improve your website’s user experience and help you attract more traffic, but it can also result in a temporary drop in rankings if not properly planned. If you are upgrading your website platform or moving to a new content management system, it is important to ensure that you preserve your search engine rankings and traffic. This involves setting up proper redirects from the old URLs to the new URLs and notifying search engines of the change.

A successful site migration will never be perfect. Unfortunately, you will see a small drop off in traffic as the site has to relearn a large amount of information and often this is almost impossible to achieve 100% of.

Whenever there are major site changes (like a migration) there is always guaranteed search volatility. Crawlers on the backend of Google work from a memory bank and this memory bank allows them to crawl deeper into the website to identify new pages or crawl further down longer pages, so when a website changes fundamentally, Google bots need to revisit this memory bank to identify the new changes which often stalls the crawling growth and depth of a website. 

SEO migrations are made up of all shapes and sizes, so giving an exact price is a difficult thing to do. Ideally, you want a partner who can custom quote your migration strategy and provide reasoning as to why it is the price they’ve quoted.

If you have a small 10-page website that is quite new, this is going to cost significantly less than a large business website with over 1,000 pages, a range of complicated internal links, backlinks and a large amount of content/metadata to sift through. Reform Digital can help identify exactly what your site migration will look like and can custom-quote a site migration strategy. Get in touch with our team to learn more!