You may have indulged in your site migration from one to another platform using various CMS like Joomla, WordPress, Drupal etc. However you must be prepared to deal with SEO issues at the same time.
When you are about to migrate your existing website to a new domain, the size of your site or how much revenue it drives does not matter. The site owner undergoes equal difficulty and nerve-wrecking moments while dealing with the emerging digital marketing trends.
Therefore it is essential that you must plan ahead with your SEO strategy while website migration to retain your traffic and search equity. The potential threat that comes from website re-launch involving domain change is dispersing a brand’s digital track that also has negative impact on sales made from search.
Here I have provided four SEO tactics that you can follow to keep up as well as advance your website’s digital authority.
Understanding Old URL and 301 Redirect Map:
There is possibility that your page URLs will also change while the entire website is being updated. Therefore you must be cautious enough and instruct the webmasters to implement permanent 301 redirect. Otherwise you’ll have to rebuild the search authority from scratch. Redirect all site pages that exist and whose URLs are changing. This way you can still get value as these URLs are capable of bringing SEO signals and internal linking.
Once you are satisfied with the new updates and Google recognizes you well, you can proceed with completing the site update. Also, if you have a new site domain put it in the Google Webmaster Tools and submits a sitemap to tell Google about your new content is live.
Perform Inbound Link Audit:
As inbound links are important to build authority in search for your pages, links are needed to be updated once you change the URLs. To establish your link profile, carry out an inbound link audit. After that, create a list of pages which you need to reclaim and arrange results in accordance to the sites having highest domain authority and importance. Here you can prefer direct links over redirected links as they’ll provide a faster and clearer pathway to content for having less moving parts.
If you have purchased a new URL then you will take over their backlink profile also. Therefore you should inspect these backlinks sources and hence update them to protect or eliminate connections as per requirement.
SEO Audit on Existing Website:
SEO audit is important because this way you can spot in your existing website the effectiveness, limitations, hazards, and prospects and also it helps to find out where you need to keep going and where you should stop. With an SEO audit you try to find missing or duplicate page titles, page titles over 512 pixels or below 200 pixels, missing or duplicate H1 tags and all other SEO related issues.
Extensive Analytics:
With a thorough and forceful analytics search for errors while crawling, mobile usability, broken internal and external links, internal and external Link count, indexed pages etc.
Conclusion:
This is not an exhaustive list of SEO strategies but all I can hope that you may find it useful while you are caught in the middle of your site migration. Additional activities may include downloading backup files, getting done with the whole process to avoid damage of files and database info, and finally focusing on promotion and SEO of your site with the help of content and user-trends based optimization.
There is no doubt that migration process is tedious and time consuming for involving so many poignant sections to look at. However, the effort and time totally worth it as a site migration is crucial for your brand growth and improvement in its digital visibility.