SEO For Migrations: A Step-By-Step Guide

SEO migration is the process of creating a plan and carrying out the transfer of your existing domain authority, ranking signals, and search engine visibility to your new website or new website URL structure. When done right, you’ll see minimal traffic loss in the short term and the ability to increase your organic traffic numbers over time.

SEO for migrations steps

Scope and planning

Make sure you are clear about the goals of your migration right from the start. These will help manage expectations and define the project timeline. You would like to offer VoIP to business users through your mobile app, not just through your website.

Map your redirects

The first step in mapping your redirects is to remove all URLs on the new site that are 100% consistent with the URLs on your old site. To do this, use Ctrl+H in your old site’s URL list and change the old domain to the new one. Copy these URLs and paste them into Netspeak Spider or Screaming Frog and scan them to see the server response code.

Post-launch review

During the post-launch review phase, you should re-run any tests you completed on migration day. Make sure you test your redirects thoroughly. Screaming Frog SEO Spider Web Crawler makes it easy to audit redirects. If you’re not sure how to audit a redirect, they have a great post here that walks you through the process.

Performance review and monitoring

After the site migration is complete, it will take some time for the search engines to crawl and re-index the site again. During this time, it is common to see keyword fluctuations and some loss of organic traffic. Depending on the size of the site, it can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months for things to settle down.

Make sure the new site is better than the old one

This should go without saying, but sometimes designers and web developers go a little overboard when migrating a website, and all that fancy programming ends up in a jumble of source code and slow loading times. If you’re going to go through the process of moving content from an old site to a new one, make sure the new one is faster, cleaner, and generally more SEO-friendly than the one you’re leaving.

Reconfigure the redirection of the old domain to the new

This is because you will have to try to reconfigure the old domain redirects to your new site. This can be solved in different ways such as Cloudflare, hosting a new site, or hosting an old site. And the easiest method for us was the configuration via the access file on the old hosting.

Conclusion

By migrating the website this way, I leveraged the collateral I had built up on the previous website over five years. And rather than it all turning to dust, I successfully put the historical content on the new website and brand.