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SEO Website Migration Services

Avoid losing organic traffic with a well planned SEO migration strategy!

Website Migration Services

Website migration isn’t an easy task, and not handling it properly can have disastrous consequences for your business, especially when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Leave the task in the capable hands of our site migration experts.

Website migration is the implementation of significant changes to a website’s content, design, platform, structure, URL, or UX. For example, you will need a site migration if you move your site to a new content management system (CMS) or domain, or if you update your site’s layout to change the URL structure.

Website SEO Migrations

If you don’t take SEO into account when migrating websites, you could see your site lose as much as between 30 and 50% of its organic traffic almost instantly. If this happens, search engines will reindex your site and your rankings will change. You will need to put a great deal of time and effort into reoptimizing your site for search engines. It’s much easier to retain your rankings and traffic levels by including SEO migration in your website migration. If this is done effectively, your site should retain its rankings and its traffic.

Our experts will help plan and implement your migration strategy, ensuring that your site is geared for successful SEO. Some of the comprehensive migration services we offer include:

  • Website migration to new platforms and hosting
  • Domain name migrations
  • Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager migrations
  • SEO migrations

A website migration could be beneficial for your business whether your site runs a small in-house solution or a renowned CMS. The platforms that we usually migrate our clients’ sites to or from include:

Each of these platforms has unique elements that can impact the migration of websites. For example, you might find that an essential plug-in doesn’t have an equivalent on your new CMS, or you might discover various database errors. For reasons like these, research is important when you’re considering replatforming, changing domain names, or choosing a new hosting provider for your site.

While it is possible to attempt website migration yourself, the process is arduous and involves a staggering amount of work and technical know-how. Entrust your site migration to our experts.

Introduction To Website Migrations

If you don’t take SEO into account when migrating websites, you could see your site lose as much as between 30 and 50% of its organic traffic almost instantly. If this happens, search engines will reindex your site and your rankings will change. You will need to put a great deal of time and effort into reoptimizing your site for search engines. It’s much easier to retain your rankings and traffic levels by including SEO migration in your website migration. If this is done effectively, your site should retain its rankings and its traffic.

Our experts will help plan and implement your migration strategy, ensuring that your site is geared for successful SEO. Some of the comprehensive migration services we offer include:

  • Website migration to new platforms and hosting
  • Domain name migrations
  • Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager migrations
  • SEO migrations

Aspects of an SEO Website Migration

A. Analytics Benchmarking: Our SEO team will benchmark your website’s current seo performance to understand content performance, priority pages, overall organic visibility, and post-migration steps.

B. URL Redirect Mapping: We’ll take stock of current URLs and then suggest the best landing page on the new website, creating a redirect map for implementation.

C. Internal Link Updating: Updating internal links is crucial to maintaining a consistent URL structure. Our SEO eam will ensure that all internal links are updated to the new URL structure.

D. Search Console Configuration: We utilise Google Search Console to notify search engines about your website’s move, ensuring that your new URLs are indexed and maintain keyword rankings.

How to perform the perfect SEO friendly website migration

Read our FREE comprehensive guide, drawing on our years of experience, helping clients navigate complex projects and difficult decisions. It reveals common SEO mistakes and how to avoid them, how to build a bullet-proof strategy, and how to perform the perfect migration while maintaining and improving your SEO performance.

Download our SEO migration guide

Reasons For Migrating Websites

Two of the main reasons why clients opt for migrating websites include:

  • Upgrading your web hosting provider as your site requires a larger server or additional bandwidth or space
  • Moving to another host

Whatever your reasons for choosing website migration, our experts will ensure that the move happens as smoothly as possible, with minimum downtime, and without any of your data being lost. We will migrate all databases, email addresses, files, and anything else required for a 100% site migration. Our team has experience with working on all sorts of sites and projects.

Our 6-step Approach to SEO Site MigrationOur smooth site migration approach aims to

make the process as painless as possible. We’ll work closely with you and your developers to ensure your migration always follows best practice.Our approach to an SEO site migration covers these 6 phases:

Benchmarking

Before we get started, it’s important for us to get a solid understanding of your goals for the new site. We’ll set benchmarks, allocate the right resources and timeframe, and set reasonable objectives to manage expectations.

Pre-Launch Preparation

This is where we’ll carry out SEO audits, review technical SEO requirements and identify any potential challenges that may interfere with the migration process — so we can plan accordingly.

Planning

With the help of our technical team, we’ll build a plan for the website migration that considers all the factors discussed above—and then execute seamlessly and efficiently!

Launch

We’ll utilise our on-page content strategies to migrate your content and data ensuring that there is no damage done to your organic rankings, website visibility, and revenue while also building in protection against future risks.

Post-launch Testing

We’ll review your site’s performance to ensure you continue to outrank the competition. Keep a close eye on your analytics and fix any unavoidable issues as they arise.

Monitoring

We’ll keep you posted on your website’s performance with regular and proactive analysis, detailed reports and collaboration with your internal teams.

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Website Migration Types

There are several different types of website migrations, including:

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Content management system

Migrating a website from the current CMS to a new CMS.

Domain Migration

Changing your website from its old domain to a new domain.

Hybrid

A combination of different types of site migrations.

Protocol Migrations

Changing your site’s protocol from http to https.

Website Redesign

Making changes to your website. These changes can range from small changes to the look and feel of your site’s layout to a site revamp with significant copy and code changes.

Subdomain & Domains Changes

Changing your site from www.yoursite.com to newsubdomain.yoursite.com or changing your site URL from a .net or a .org to a .com or vice versa.

Content Management System Migration Services

Our website migrations team is ready to help you migrate your current site to your preferred CMS, such as moving your site from Joomla! to WordPress. Our work will result in enhanced user experience and improved site performance. The process includes:

  • Assessing your current site
  • Developing a CMS migration strategy
  • In-depth analysis of SEO best practices
  • Migration of website design elements
  • Content importation
  • Website functionality testing
  • Reviewing your site
  • Developing a launch strategy

Domain Name Migration Services

Search engines use domain names and domain structure when crawling your site, so a dramatic change to your domain name can be as risky as migrating a website entirely. Our website migration team will develop the best redirect strategy to transfer authority to your new domain and to guide search engines. We offer the following domain name migration services:

  • Best practice implementation consultation
  • Redirect strategy and URL mapping
  • Analysis of search engine crawlers
  • Internal link and site navigation repair
  • Analysis and recommendations after site migration
  • Database error troubleshooting

Web Hosting Migration

Web hosting migration requires careful consideration. You need to find a reliable new web host, migrate your site to the new hosting provider, update your domain, and more, all while minimizing downtime. Our web hosting migration services include:

  • Assisting with evaluating and choosing a new web host
  • Creating existing website data backups
  • Migration of website to the new provider
  • Migration process implementation
  • Domain updating
  • Minimizing/preventing downtime

SEO Migration Services

Our SEO website migration services aim to reduce SEO risks and downtime while moving your site efficiently and effectively. Part of this process involves consulting with our team of SEO experts to make sure your site conforms to all SEO best practices before launch and that all pages redirect properly. Our SEO site migration services include:

  • URL crawl and page inventory of your current site
  • Benchmarking Analytics
  • URL redirect mapping
  • Updating internal links
  • Canonicalization of pages
  • Removing duplicate content
  • Verifying your site migration with Bing and Google
  • Updating backlinks
  • Benchmarking your site’s ranking and visibility

Our team will review your site’s technical code to ensure that it runs as quickly as possible and doesn’t have a negative effect on SEO, and we’ll audit your site’s content to determine what should stay and what should be removed. Our experts will analyze your site’s URL structure, ensuring they include the right keywords and are optimized. We’ll also ensure that your folder structure is optimized.

Our team will audit your site’s internal links, and we’ll review your sitemap files and robots.txt for proper Google site indexing. In addition, we will plan proper 301 redirects, optimize new content and pages you want to add to your site, and provide you with proven SEO strategy ideas, assisting you with implementing them if need be.

Common SEO migration questions

How long does SEO website migration take?

The amount of time SEO website migration takes varies from project to project, as it depends on a number of variables, such as:

Backlink profile: The complexity and size of your old site’s backlink profile has ramifications on SEO, which could affect your SEO strategy.

Content additions: New pages, sections, and other optimizable resources on your site can affect the time a site migration takes.

Dynamic optimizations: The need to deploy dynamic tags for meta descriptions, titles, and other SEO elements can increase the site migration time.

Existing organic value: More resources are needed to protect your site’s existing organic value and rankings if there is much to preserve. Our experts can assist you with assessing your site’s existing organic value.

URLs: Whether your site’s URLs will remain the same or be changed can affect the project timeline.

Website size: It takes longer to properly migrate a larger site than it does a smaller site.

What happens if I don’t migrate my website’s SEO elements?

If you don’t choose SEO website migration when moving your site, your new site will be much less optimized, which could see traffic decrease by anything between 30 and 90% in a short time. If that happens, the only solutions are to reoptimize your site or to identify the SEO elements that weren’t migrated, move them to your new site, and wait for search engines to pick up on those changes.

How do you assess an SEO migration’s impact?

We assess an SEO migration’s impact in several ways. We run a baseline keyword report and compare current and future rankings with those of your old site, use Google Analytics to analyze your site’s traffic by medium and/or source, and analyze the following metrics such as organic conversions including form completions, leads, and sales, organic keyword rankings, and organic traffic.

With all the risks, is site migration still worth it?

Can migrating a website impact SEO?

As mentioned, migrating websites can affect SEO. Anything from a domain migration to major structural changes can affect your site’s speed, rankings, visibility, and other elements. Our website migration process aims to reduce the risks your site faces when being moved or changed. Some of the benefits of reliable SEO site migrations include:

Improved URL structure
Easier updates to your site when re-platforming
Enhanced user experience and design
Boosted site speeds

A small impact on your site’s SEO is inevitable even when migration of websites is performed properly. However, you can expect this to be followed by a rebound that sees traffic return to normal if not increase.

What are the common reasons for migrating?

Two of the main reasons why clients opt for migrating websites include:

Upgrading your web hosting provider as your site requires a larger server or additional bandwidth or space
Moving to another host

Whatever your reasons for choosing website migration, our experts will ensure that the move happens as smoothly as possible, with minimum downtime, and without any of your data being lost. We will migrate all databases, email addresses, files, and anything else required for a 100% site migration. Our team has experience with working on all sorts of sites and projects.

The Risks Of Site Migrations

There are several risks associated with site migrations, which is why proper planning and testing are an essential part of the process. Among the potential risks are:

We avoid these SEO migration issues by taking a meticulous approach to the work we do and by:

• Maintaining the same URL structure or implementing redirects
• Transferring content to rankings and main authority
• Testing your site’s navigation and links to check for errors

Loss of traffic

Organic traffic might drop if your site’s content, structure, or links are changed. Detailed URL mapping before implementing the website migration can help reduce this risk.

Negative impact on on-site SEO

Not migrating meta descriptions, title tags, and other elements properly can impact your on-site SEO. This also can lead to issues with headings, formatting, and other aspects of your site. Proper testing for these important elements is essential after migrating websites.

Decrease in conversions

Site redesign of anything from changing a button’s color or a CTA size can lead to a decrease in conversions.

Broken links

If links are broken, they can impact search engine rankings and organic users, so it’s vital that internal link issues are resolved, and redirects are implemented where necessary.

Site Speed Implications

Your site’s page speeds could be negatively impacted by a lack of server optimization and proper caching, which could lead to a decrease in leads, traffic, and revenue.

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