SEO Site Migration: How Website Migration Affects SEO Ranking
Website Migration
Website migration is the process of making important changes to a website server, host, UI (user interface), and UX (user experience). The main objective of website migration is to improve SEO performance and the user experience.
Common reasons to perform Website Migration
- Change the domain name.
- Change HTTP to HTTPS.
- Changing the website architecture
- Changing the framework
- Shift from one to another platform
Benefits of a successful migration
- Security
- Updating content
- Better SEO optimization
- Better performance
- Fast results
SEO (search engine optimization) involves the process of improving the website and increasing its findability on Google and other websites. People will find your website more easily with their results. The chances of attracting website visitors are high. The main aim of the SEO process is to help your website increase its rank in people’s search results.
Why SEO is Important During Website Migration
SEO helps to maintain the website’s visibility, ranking, and traffic. During website migration, the content, design, server, and hostname changes. If SEO is poorly executed, the website may lose 20–30% of its organic traffic within a couple of hours. It also has an impact on their goodwill and online presence.
SEO Challenges During Website Migration
There are many challenges SEO faces during a website migration. We will discuss five challenges here.
Loss of organic traffic: During website migration, it is common to see the fluctuation or the loss of organic traffic. If the SEO is properly executed, then we will again see traffic to our website. This traffic includes both new and old website visitors. If the SEO is badly executed, then this time we lose 30–40% of organic traffic permanently within a day.
Internal links are broken: A broken link is just a link with a landing page that doesn’t work and shows the 404 error. But we can fix this error by using the deep crawl to find the broken link, and when you find that link, it redirects the link to the owner. For a better visitor experience, you can use a URL mapping document.
Lower conversion rate: After the migration, your conversion rate will decrease. There are various reasons for this. The reasons are the different appearance of the fill box and new pop-up ads. The simple solution is tools like Hotjar, which help you gain a brief understanding of how visitors interact with your website.
Indexation problem: Search engines like Google and Bing face difficulty counting your new URL link. If the migration process is not properly executed, the updated list might not be correct, which leads to less visibility on your website. It’s good to get the help of a professional SEO expert.
Manual actions and unnatural links: Unnatural links are spammy links that show websites with low authority and malicious websites sending this link to your website. That is why Google provides users with manual actions. To tackle this situation, you need to analyze the backlink report to find the spammy link and report it to Google before starting to migrate.
The best process you can apply during migration
Creating a Migration Plan
In this step, we create a migration plan. This plan helps us identify objectives and formulate the course of action that is required to achieve the objective. As you already know, the common objectives of migration are restructuring the website, changing the niche or improving content, introducing new features, and achieving desired sales results.
Set up 301 redirects
301 redirects are an HTTP protocol that tells the search engines that the URL address is permanently changed. This step is crucial in the migration process because it verifies that the backlinks pointing to our previous website will be transferred to our new website. 301 redirects are considered the best SEO practice during a website migration.
Update all Internal links
In this step, we update all internal links. Internal links are the connections of links that direct from one page to another page of our website. Internal links help the search engines understand our website better and boost its rank. It’s important to update all these links during the migration process to correct the pages on our website.
Updating XML Sitemaps
An XML sitemap is a file that lists all the URLs or pages of a particular site and provides information to Google for indexing their pages. In website migration, you need to update the XML sitemap. It helps to list the new URLs for the pages.
Conclusion
We learn a lot about website migration, why it’s important, the process that is implemented during migration, and the challenges SEO faces during migration. For a successful execution, you can take the help of an SEO specialist or you can get help from the best digital marketing company in Dubai and India. They will provide you with the best assistance and ensure the safeguarding of your website during website migration.
