When you decide to migrate your website into a new domain or structure, it becomes essential to consider the impact on your search engine optimization (SEO). Site migration SEO can significantly affect the SEO ranking of website and organic traffic if it is not handled carefully.
Here in this article, we will explore how migration affects SEO ranking of website and showcase simple and easy-to-understand insights on managing these processes effectively.
We'll Take You Through
Common issues with site migration
Lack of correct redirects
URL structures may differ during website migrations. These kinds of websites are considered valid e-commerce websites that may have common subfolders for products and/or categories.
You must set up redirects from the old to the new page during this. For permanent changes, one can utilize 301 redirects. Failure to do this can result in the wastage of older pages, as these pages will have historic value recognized by search engines.
Furthermore, website migrations are often combined with a content audit. Within this procedure, the websites will remove irrelevant or outdated content. After that, these pages must also be redirected to a similar page. While this requires a content audit, we can migrate the websites instead. Generally, this part is avoided as it contains complexity in the migration process, which makes it more challenging to diagnose the issues involved.
Changes in the tech stack
When migrating to a new tech stack is adopted, the website may undergo a wide range of changes. These changes include rendering options, JavaScript files, and much more.
Some CMS may come with more bloat, which can often take the form of plugins that aren’t required anyway. For instance, a WordPress website that was primarily a blog and lead capture website with e-commerce functionality with WooCommerce would be a waste of resources.
This slows the website’s processing and makes it harder for search engines to render and understand, ultimately impacting the SEO ranking of website.
Benefits of Staging Sites for Testing
Grabbing the same technique tells that search engines are not required to crawl or index the staging site. We need to do this; otherwise, the staging site can be found within the search results and compete with the live website for the SEO ranking of websites.
One can partially check that the Disallow: / rule is ported over from the staging site onto the live site when released. If left unchecked, a site can fall out of the index completely.
This can devastate websites, as organic traffic and leads/revenue will decrease.
Learn More: 5 Ways AI Content Impacts SEO and How to Avoid Pitfalls
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How can such issues be avoided?
Begin the SEO from the first stage
Even before signing off on the migration, it would be beneficial to introduce SEO at the very first step. This step can act as one of the most vital steps ahead, as any SEO professional can help you through a site migration SEO.
If the SEO has been working on the site for a while, the SEO professionals will understand where potential pitfalls can be placed and what opportunities can be capitalized on to improve the website.
The earlier you involve an SEO professional in a website migration, the better the site will be.
Understand Migration Reasons and Scope
Why do we want to migrate the website in the first place?” This question answers the question of what potential changes will be made in the website migration procedure.
Migration affects SEO ranking of website, which is why site migration SEO should be considered.
For example, search engines will treat content in accordions differently from visible content. So, if you are introducing accordions within the website, there must be a plan of action to ensure work for SEO as well as UX.
Audit the website Before and After Migration
Before migrating over, things will inevitably be made available on the currently available website. This allows the professional developers to make the findings of technical errors that could be fixed with the migration. One can also utilize any CMS inclusions to block the ways of blockers.This audit of the entire website acts as a snapshot in time. It includes URLs that can be crawled and found within the analytics platform.
Conclusion
After the site migration is completed, the newly created website must also be audited. The findings can be compared against the pre-migration audit to identify any issues or pages that may have been missed.
