5 Tips for Keeping SEO During Website Migration
When a website goes through migration, several areas may be affected including the platform that it is hosted on, layout and design, and the information on the site. During this process, it is important to keep the site’s SEO intact as much as possible to prevent a significant loss of traffic and sales. A well-executed migration can even help to boost your rankings. Here are some tips for keeping SEO during a website migration.
Migrate a Website While Keeping SEO Strong
Create a Site Backup
Before you start to make any changes to your site, it’s essential that you back it up so that you can go back to the old version of it if technical errors happen or if you decide that you want to use your original site. Check with your website host to see what solutions they have for backing up your site. If your site is on a platform such as WordPress, the platform may also have website backup options. Here are some tips on backing up a WordPress site.
Evaluate Your Content
When migrating your site, be careful to only make changes to things that will help it in the future. Find what keywords you are getting the most traffic for and which of your web pages are helping you to generate traffic and sales the most. Keep these pages. You can remove or change pages that are not really helping you to meet your goals.
Create Your Website Structure
Plan the layout of your new website, including the appearance, website navigation, and content. Make sure to create a clean layout that is easy for people to navigate so that they can quickly and easily find the information they are looking for. Have a few people test your site to see if they can find what they want with ease. Here are some of the must-have components to include for your site:
● Contact Us Page
● About Page
● Locations Page
● Products / Services Page
● Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
● Social Media Icons
● Help Guides
● Blog Articles
● Policy Pages
● Search Field
● Testimonials
In addition to making a layout of your new site, also create one for your current site so that you will be able to clearly see the elements to migrate, and set up 301 redirects. These redirects will lead visitors to new pages when they click on old links.
Optimize Your Pages
To help with keeping SEO during website migration, optimize your pages. Avoid having duplicate content on your old site and new site, which can lower your rankings. Instead direct people to your new site when someone enters an old URL from your previous site. Also, make sure to update internal links within your pages.
Evaluate the Results
Once you have completed your migration, it’s important to continue to monitor the results to make sure that everything is looking good. Here are some things to check:
● Check to see if your site is being crawled correctly by search engines.
● Check to see that your website speed is efficient and that your pages are loading fast. If not, find ways to improve it.
● Look at your new website both on desktop and mobile browsers to make sure that everything looks good and your site is optimizing for mobile devices.
Are you looking to migrate your website? At Mission Web Marketing we can help you with your migration while maintaining your SEO standing. Get in touch today.