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Migrating your website is sometimes necessary (a design overhaul, a change of CMS, technical upgrades, etc.), but it requires careful preparation in advance to avoid any unpleasant surprises regarding your SEO traffic. And many businesses learn this the hard way! A drop in the number of qualified visitors, a slump in click-through rates, fewer leads… and, as a result, a freefall in turnover if you run an e-commerce business. Admittedly, the temptation to have a faster, more modern website is strong, but you need expert support during this transition. With an agency that’s truly competent in SEO, a website migration can be carried out without major disruption, whilst maintaining your search engine rankings. Here’s why.
When you change a website’s structure, you’re directly altering what search engines already know. For example, Google has indexed your pages, understood how they’re organised, identified which ones are performing well… and a migration disrupts this established order.
Whilst this may seem like a logical step for you, to search engines it’s akin to a new website that has yet to prove itself. And it is this ‘re-learning’ phase that can lead to a loss of visibility, unless you’re supported by a reputable and qualified SEO agency #adsup.
When migrating from one website to another, URLs generally change (particularly for the purposes of SEO optimisation). And whilst this may seem trivial on paper, in practice Google will treat the old page as having disappeared and the new one as having no history. As a result, the page loses its ranking, even if the content of the page hasn’t changed one iota.
301 redirects are the lifeblood of SEO during a website migration. Let’s take the example of an e-commerce site selling shoes that is removing several categories. Before the migration, a product page such as mysite.com/running-shoes-mike-air was well-ranked on Google and generated regular sales. After the redesign, the page was renamed to mysite.com/running/mike-air, but the redirect was not set up.
Google will then treat the old page as having been completely removed. The result? It is no longer indexed, and all the visibility it had built up is lost…
Internal linking is a valuable SEO tool that helps Google understand and crawl a website #hierarchy. Let’s take the example of our shoes website again. Before the migration, the product page for ‘Adsup Performance men’s running shoes’ was accessible via the main categories ‘men’s shoes’ and ‘best sellers’. After the migration, the product page “Adsup Performance men’s running shoes” still exists, but it can now be accessed by clicking on “catalogue” then “sport”, and it no longer appears in the “best sellers” section.
This will have disastrous consequences for your SEO: Google will find it harder to crawl these pages and will gradually reduce their ranking.
Here is an SOS from an SEO beacon in distress. That famous coded language whose shorthand is known only to web developers. Think of them as the yellow buoys in a channel that help the Google ship stay on the right course to reach its destination safely.
To put it without resorting to dubious metaphors, they tell Google about the page’s structure and content. During a migration, these tags may be altered, truncated or modified, and the signal becomes less clear to Google, which, as a result, will consider the page to be less relevant for its keywords.
Backlinks in SEO are a bit like a letter of recommendation written by your former boss ✒️. They lend authority and prestige, especially if that boss is a renowned figure in their field. More specifically, when an external website links to one of your pages, it sends a signal to Google: “this content is worth seeing”.
If your page’s URL changes and no redirect is set up, the external link will still exist… but it will no longer lead anywhere. The user will be taken to an error page, and, more importantly, Google will no longer be able to pass on the ‘SEO value’ of that backlink to your new page.
It’s a bit as if the letter of recommendation still existed, but it was addressed to a company that no longer exists.
As you can see, migrating a website requires careful preparation in advance, particularly to ensure that all the hard work your SEO team has put in over months or years isn’t wiped out. You’ve earned your number one ranking on Google, and it would be a shame to plummet down the search results when your aim was simply to offer a more attractive and effective website to your customers or users.
An experienced SEO agency such as Ad’s up Consulting knows all the ins and outs and the pitfalls to avoid in order to keep your website at the top of the rankings.
So, naturally, after everything we’ve just written on the subject, you might be a bit wary of the idea of migrating your website. And yet, this is actually a great opportunity to optimise your content and strengthen your SEO strategy.
Because, yes, migration is an opportunity to incorporate SEO into an overall strategy for developing your website. And it’s the web agency working with you that will help you put this into practice.
Having an SEO professional guide you through your website migration inevitably involves a cost, but above all it helps to preserve a vital asset: your visibility. Ad’s up Consulting is a leading provider of SEA and SEO support for businesses. A pioneer in acquisition strategies, the company is proud to support major corporations as well as start-ups and institutional organisations.
To find out more about our targeted performance support, please get in touch with our team via the dedicated page.
Let’s recap and take some notes:
