SEO migration checklist: 32 steps to migration success
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There is nothing more nerve-wracking in SEO than a site migration. Whether you’re migrating to a new platform, you’re changing your URLs, you’ve redesigned your site, or you just want to start afresh, SEO migrations are tricky.
With so many variables it can be difficult to get everything right. But, Embryo can help. We have worked with site migrations for sites both big and small and in this blog, we have pulled together a checklist of everything you need to get right, to ensure that your migration goes off without a hitch.
What it means, and the different types of website migration
The types of migration we have described below typically heavily rely on web developers and involve a lot of technical work. So what do we mean by SEO migration?
An SEO migration involves ensuring that the changes you make to your website guarantee that rankings for a website are kept, along with site authority and indexing signals. The hope is that organic traffic losses from your changes are minimal.
There are many different types of website migration; depending on the type you’re embarking on, you might find the work involved a little more complicated / a little easier.
Site redesign: This can include minor design changes to help improve UX or complete overhauls of how your pages and their content look and feel. This is the migration where SEOs are most often left out but an SEO must oversee the changes to ensure that rankings and visibility aren’t lost.
CMS change: This involves changing the platform your site is built on (e.g., WordPress > Shopify). It’s important to ensure that URLs stay the same and that all meta information is transferred.
Site structure reorganisation: This migration involves significant changes to your site structure. Think URL changes, site hierarchy changes, nav changes, and adjustments to internal linking.
International migration: If you’re hoping to start ranking internationally you’ll have to make adjustments to your site, such as including international subfolders, hreflang, and content tailored to a user’s location.
Domain switch: This involves switching the domain of your website. Typically this is done as part of a rebrand or for overall business growth.
What are the risks associated with site migrations?
Site migrations gone wrong can be disastrous for businesses – they can result in a loss of visibility, traffic, and ultimately, leads/sales. The severity of that loss will depend on how much has changed and what new issues the new version of your site is contending with.
To mitigate these risks it’s important to properly plan your migration and respect the magnitude of the task. Even small changes to a website can, when not properly planned for, cause dramatic impacts on traffic and other key metrics.
Let’s look at some of the things that can lead to a poor website migration, even though they can be easily avoided…
Not enough planning
A site migration is no easy task – it needs to be properly managed, planned, and documented. Failure to do so can lead to issues the entire team are left to contend with. To plan effectively, you should be very clear on: the purpose of the migration, resource allocation, team roles/responsibilities, turnaround times, the migration checklist, and backup plans should anything not go as planned.
Poor communication among team members
Communication is absolutely key – all team members should be on the same page at all times. Otherwise, if several team members are facing challenges that they do not voice, this can lead to misalignment and several challenges along the way.
A lack of testing
If you’re conducting your testing in a staging environment before pushing the changes live, make sure you have a rigorous testing procedure. Get different stakeholders involved along the way – developers, SEOs, project managers, and the client or – if you’re in-house – your wider marketing team and C-Suite. This avoids any unhappy stakeholders, and missing things out during testing can mean more work down the line too.
Not having SEO involved
Website migrations are not mutually exclusive – to consider one properly, you must consider the other. Getting an SEO involved in the migration process means that they can advise and implement any actions relating to redirects, crawlability, site downtime, and the potential fluctuations of traffic and rankings.
Deadlines not being properly considered
Site migrations take time, but of course pressures from above or from clients might leave you tempted to bring the deadline forward. However, rushing the process or setting short deadlines can only lead to further issues as you’ll miss crucial steps, and the new site will go live with mistakes. That can then sometimes lead to further delays anyway down the line as you’ll need to get these fixed.
How much does it cost to migrate a site?
Unfortunately, this question isn’t the easiest to answer. It all comes down to how much is changing on-site, the size of your site, auditing the staging site, assessing on-page content, and implementation.
We advise looking for a company that has experience working with large-scale site migrations and who can show you a detailed plan of how they are going to take your site from A to B.
How long does an SEO migration take?
This will largely depend on the type of migration you’re undertaking, how many 301 redirects you need to implement, copy changes, and the size of your website. The key thing to note when considering how long this project will take is: to give yourself enough time. There’s far more to a migration than just mapping old URLs > new URLs.
SEO migration checklist
Pre-launch
Is a site migration necessary?
The first consideration before embarking on a site migration should be: whether it is necessary. Many businesses look to change their brand or their domain name for vanities sake, rather than considering the ROI.
Suppose you feel that the change to your site will reap rewards. But if you aren’t sure how the migration might benefit your business, don’t do it.
Define your goals
If you have decided that migration is the right move, then start to consider your goals. What are you hoping to achieve with your migration? This will likely inform the type of migration you embark on. Are you trying to improve UX? Are you hoping to move to a simpler CMS? Have you changed your branding?
Know what you want to get out of the project and you’ll find it easier to plan for.
When’s the best time to migrate?
Does your business have peak seasons? Do you see more traffic over the summer? You’ll obviously want to avoid migrating in these key periods. Assess when your quietest time is and plan your migration work accordingly.
Ensure every team member has a clear role/responsibility
From the get-go, note down who’s involved in the project and what their role will be, then ensure that this is reflected in the migration timeline and everybody knows when they’re needed, and why.
You could use a project management tool to showcase this, and to ensure everybody’s on the same page.
Backup your website
Create a full backup of your existing site. Even the best-laid plans can go to waste, so it’s best to be prepared. You can always reinstate your previous site if something goes terribly wrong in this migration.
Crawl and benchmark your existing site
As well as creating a backup we suggest creating a thorough crawl of your existing domain using a tool like Screaming Frog. This will help ensure that you have a list of all your current indexable URLs and their corresponding meta. Super useful when it comes to creating a redirect and migrating metadata over to the new domain.
Create some traffic benchmarks too. Understand your existing site’s performance, keyword reach, and conversion rates, so that you can see how much better (or worse) your new site performs.
Do a full crawl of the website, to extract the URLs
By crawling the site/what will be the old site, you can get a list of URLs which will be crucial when setting up redirects, preserving site structure, and making sure that no pages are lost during the process of migrating.
That being said, be aware that you may not be able to find all the URLs of the old site just be doing the crawl – ensure you also have a dig around in the CMS and Google Search Console.
Prioritise URLs by importance
As well as knowing general performance, it’s good to know which of your existing pages has the most SEO value in terms of both links and traffic. You can use this data to ensure that pages that do very well in organic aren’t changed too drastically in terms of on-page content. You should also understand which URLs are relied on by paid marketing channels to ensure that those move over, too.
> Identify URLs with good traffic
> Identify URLs with a high number of backlinks
> Identify which URLs are being used by paid
Map old URLs > new URLs
Make sure that any URLs that are set to change are 301 redirected to their new site equivalent. This will ensure that all traffic and SEO value is passed from one URL to another. Again, tools like Screaming Frog can make your life easier here, allowing you to pull all URLs from both your new and old sites and match them up.
Create a test environment for your new site
Create a test site that will allow you to try your new designs, test new functions and assess the structure of your new website. You’ll be able to use this to troubleshoot potential problems here, too, without diminishing the UX of your current website.
Ensure the test site is blocked from indexation and crawling
A vital step is making sure that your new site can’t be crawled or indexed whilst it’s in development. This is because having test pages, or unfinished pages, visible to search engines and users can impact your organic performance as well as user experience. Aside from that, if content is the same on the new site as your current site, having both the test site and the live site visible can lead to content duplication issues.
Ensure all meta has been moved to the new site
Review all on-page elements on your new website. They should be the same, as good as, or better than the on-page SEO elements of your old site. Doing so on your test environment will allow you to A) make sure your new site is SEO ready from the off and B) check that everything is optimised as well as it can be before going live.
Update internal links on the new site
If some or all of your URLs are changing, make sure that you update internal links on the staging website. Failing to do this may mean that you’re left with lots of internal redirects or worse, broken internal links when your new site is pushed live.
Perform a full audit of the new site on the test environment
Once you’re confident that links have been updated and that on-page data is up-to-date then we advise conducting a full technical audit of your staging site. This should ensure that nothing’s fallen through the cracks. Developers can often build beautiful websites but may miss some fundamental SEO components.
Complete any on-page SEO for the site in the test environment
Any on-page optimisations should be done ahead of the new website going live. This includes title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and image alt text. Some of it could be carried across, but it’s worth re-optimising where needed so the site is SEO-friendly from the get-go.
Ensure the XML sitemap is up-to-date
Review XML sitemaps to ensure that all of them contain links to the new site rather than older URLs if applicable.
Make sure robots.txt is up-to-date and correct
It’s important that if large-scale changes have been made the robots.txt file contains the correct directives to disallow certain areas of the site. Remember, your staging site should be no indexed within the robots.txt and this will need to be updated on go-live.
Move all schema over
Make sure that any schema that existed on your previous website has been moved to your new site. This is also a great opportunity to review where schema may be beneficial on your new website.
Post-launch
Launch the site
If you’re confident that all of your preparation tasks are completed and you’ve left no stone unturned then it is time to go live. Remember to schedule go live during off-peak hours so that you can avoid causing disruption to users.
Make sure it can be crawled and indexed
Now it’s live, you need to make sure that search engines can both crawl and index it. Review your robots.txt and crawl the site using Screaming Frog to check that all URLs are crawlable and indexable.
Update Google Search Console
Once live make sure that you update your Google Search Console by submitting your new sitemap. If you’ve changed domains entirely, you will need to setup a new Google Search Console account.
Test your redirects
This is another good opportunity to test your redirects. You want to make sure that they all point to URLs that return a 200 status code, aren’t part of a chain, and that they do not point to the staging site.
Getting your redirects wrong can dramatically affect rankings so don’t be afraid to double-check these.
Test any forms and CTAs
Whether it’s a contact form, a newsletter sign-up, or a ‘shop now’ button, it’s important to make sure that any forms and CTAs are in working order. Whilst a site migration needs to have careful SEO considerations, these elements that can impact user experience are just as important.
Update tracking codes where necessary
Make sure any important tracking codes on site have been moved over. Think Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Tag Manager, and Facebook. Doing this will mean you can track your site’s performance post-migration and allow you to monitor whether you’ve achieved your goals.
Crawl and audit the new site again
Now the site is live, do another crawl and audit the website. Check for broken internal links, links that point to the development domain, and on-page elements that might have been overlooked. View the site as if it’s brand new and address any remaining issues on site.
We also recommend reviewing page speed here. Are there any new opportunities for your site to be optimised in relation to site speed?
Fix any issues as soon as you can
Work through whatever issues you have flagged in priority order – working on those with the highest priority first. Delaying this process could mean traffic and rankings suffer any more than they already are. It’s important to get to this swiftly!
Track visibility with rank-tracking tools
You can use Search Console and other tools like SERanking and Ahrefs to monitor your keyword rankings. It isn’t uncommon for successful migrations to see a temporary drop in visibility while search engines work out what’s changed. Keep a close eye on your main keywords to make sure that they bounce back to positions they were in before (or improved positions).
Set up regular crawls post-migration
It’s important that you set up regular crawls of your new site now it’s live. You should (if you have a good SEO strategy) be constantly adding to and updating the content on your site. As it grows, your site will become susceptible to more SEO issues, which will need to be addressed regularly.
Submit a new sitemap to Google Search Console Bing Webmaster Tools
When the new site is live and after search engines have crawled the old XML sitemap, a vital step is generating a new one and submitting it to Google Search Console and Bingmaster Web Tools, to help the search engines understand your new site structure and find your pages.
Inform users and subscribers if you wish to
If your new website is part of a rebrand, you may wish to inform both your subscribers and website users. The latter may also be important if the backend of the website has changed (for example, if you change CMS), and colleagues need training.
Assess the impact
After a couple of months, you can assess the impact of your changes alongside the goals you laid out at the start of the project. Have you seen an increase in conversions? Has your brand redesign affected CTR or conversions? Has your site restructure impacted organic traffic?
Evaluate the project
Would you consider the migration a success? If you were to embark on one again in the future, what would you do differently? Website migrations are complex and have many moving parts, so evaluating what went well and what didn’t will not only help if you do another in the future, but it’ll also make you a better marketer.
So there you have it. These tasks we believe to be the foundation of a good migration strategy. Remember, proper planning can help guarantee your migration goes as smoothly as possible.
There’s more to an SEO migration than mapping old URLs to new URLs. It’s the perfect chance to improve your site, enhance your SEO strategy and super-charge your site’s UX. Be patient, be diligent, and plan and your migration will be a success.
If you are looking for help with your site migration then Embryo can help you plan and implement it. Find out more information here.
