SEO Website Migration Services

To help minimise any negative impact a website migration could have on your SEO, we have put together a checklist that should be followed to ensure a successful migration that adheres to SEO best practice.

1. Discovery audit – There needs to be a period of discovery where the current performance and make-up of the website are looked at. This is a great chance to find out what works well and what doesn’t work as well. This exercise will highlight what is important to replicate on the new site and what elements of the site can be improved.
2. Structure and planning – This section is a follow on from the discovery. Using the findings from the discovery, you can look to plan and structure what pages you need to exist after the migration and where these will sit within the structure and hierarchy of the website.
3. Content optimisation – For this you should already have a set of keywords and a keyword research document which houses all the queries you are aiming to rank your site for. Where possible, you should look to improve the content, whether that be on-page or metadata, to help rank for the queries you’re targeting. It’s key to note for this stage that wholesale changes are not always required, especially to pages that are already performing well.
4. Redirects – This is the most important stage of the checklist if you are migrating platforms and/or changing URL structure. 301 redirects need to be put in place so that every page on the current site is mapped to a URL on the new site, meaning that any SEO value that the current URLs hold will be passed to the new URL once the migration takes place.
5. Development best practices – Once the new website is nearing completion and content is confirmed and redirects are mapped, it is important that technical SEO is considered. The new site should be checked to ensure it has all technical SEO best practices such as heading structure, schema markup, canonicalisation and more, carried over. You should work with a developer or whoever is developing the site to ensure these technical SEO best practice requirements are in place for launch.
6. Performance monitoring – After the site is migrated and set live, the next two to four weeks are crucial in regard to SEO performance. Performance should be monitored daily to check on the status of indexation for the new site. As well as this, traffic and rankings on core key terms should be closely monitored to ensure the site doesn’t decline and lose SEO visibility. Checking key SEO platforms such as Search Console, GA4 and SEMrush will help keep on top of any issues that may arise.

Although the above checklist doesn’t detail every check that should be followed when performing a website migration, it does provide the main areas of focus that should be considered when carrying out a website migration. If you have any further questions on this checklist then please get in touch.