Whether you want to launch a new website or revamp your current website’s structure, things often go wrong with SEO during migrations. They often cause you to lose rankings in Google’s search results—even though you’ve worked so hard to achieve them.
To prevent that from happening, you need to come up with a solid strategy before the migration. If you know what you’re doing, you can avoid mistakes and problems. That way, your ranking will remain intact, and visitors will still be able to find you.
The goal of an SEO migration is to migrate your website in such a way that its rankings in Google’s search results and those of other search engines remain unchanged. An important part of this is properly redirecting old URLs to new ones. There are different types of website migrations:
No matter which scenario you face, it’s important to prepare thoroughly for your website’s migration so that your search engine visibility remains intact.
Good preparation is half the battle, especially when it comes to website migrations. With a clear step-by-step plan, you can ensure that everything goes smoothly, so you don’t lose your search engine rankings or visitors.
To ensure a smooth SEO migration, we use a migration plan consisting of 7 clear steps for every website migration. These 7 steps are:
If you replace existing URLs with new ones and don’t guide search engines to the new pages, they’ll encounter a 404 page. This error message indicates that the URLs no longer exist, causing your rankings and pages to drop significantly in search results. The new pages usually haven’t been indexed yet, and moreover, your URLs have built up a certain value with Google during the time your current pages have been online.
If you don’t handle the migration properly, the value of the old pages won’t be passed on to the new ones. As a result, the new pages won’t be able to rank as high as the old ones right away, because those pages had already built up a lot of value.
So you’ll have to start all over again to secure good positions in the search results. That can take quite a while, costing you a lot of visitors, conversions, and revenue in the meantime. If the migration is done incorrectly, it will have a significant impact on your online business. In some cases, a drop in leads and sales can even be fatal for your business.
You won’t be the first company to experience a significant drop in revenue due to a botched website migration; countless companies—both large and international—have made the same costly mistake. That’s reason enough to plan your migration down to the last detail.
Website migration is often greatly underestimated. Yet the risks and consequences can be very serious. And the consequences of a poorly executed migration aren’t something you can just easily overcome.
To ensure that your website migration goes smoothly, it’s therefore a good idea to enlist the help of an expert with extensive experience in SEO migrations. This goes beyond just SEO knowledge; it’s important that the expert also understands the technical aspects. Only then can they guide you through the entire process.
If you want to take the risk of tackling an SEO migration on your own, check out our blog to learn how to carry out a migration in 7 steps.
Our consultants have the knowledge and experience needed to ensure that every website migration is a success. As the link between your marketers and developers, we know exactly what needs to be done. It’s no coincidence that we’ve already carried out countless website migrations, ranging from small (50 pages) to large (migrating 40 websites with over 4,000,000 URLs to a single platform).
This way, we ensure that you don’t lose any rankings in the search results and that you attract at least as many visitors as before.