So, you’re having a new website built and you think you’ve thought of everything that might possibly go wrong…. Or have you?
You’ve got a web designer to design it for you, a web developer to build it for you, you’ve discussed content and budget no end with other people in the business, but have you thought about how this new website could affect whether or not your business continues to be seen on search engines?
You would think that a bright, shiny new website would do even better than your old one in search engine results, and it will, as long as you’ve migrated your SEO properly and not completely changed your content!
As a digital marketing agency, if we’re building your website for you, we’ll make sure your SEO migration goes smoothly, but this isn’t always the case and we sometimes end up with people coming to us once the new site has gone live and they’ve found themselves wondering where all of their traffic has disappeared to. “But we were ranking number one for this last week?” “But we’re so well known in the area!” are some of the things we often hear.
What is a website migration, though?
You might’ve read all of the above and just thought huh? What is she going on about? Well, you don’t need to know what I’m going on about, because Ascendancy can do it for you…. But in case you were wondering, a website migration can consist of multiple things, but here we’re talking about building a new website to replace an old one (even if it’s on the same server.)
How can you make sure that this doesn’t happen to you?
- Make sure that any pages that are ranking well don’t get the chop!
It’s likely that your new website is replacing an existing one, and you’ll be changing it for a reason. As well as wanting to improve the look and feel, it’s likely that you’ll remove some old pages, and add in some new ones. Rest assured that we would make sure to identify which pages are ranking well, and what phrases they rank for, using Google Analytics and Search Console to make sure that this content is identified and a strategy put in place to carry that traffic over, by putting in place equivalent content, for example. Pages that don’t rank well or have any external links pointing to them don’t necessarily need to be kept, as dropping those pages won’t lead to a drop in traffic or search engine rankings..
- Make sure you and your web developer have put a thorough set of 301 redirects in place. This kind of redirect signals to Google that a permanent redirect from one URL to another has been made.
We’ve seen clients lose a serious amount of traffic when this has not been considered and done properly. Often a business might not realise that one really good blog that they wrote 4 years ago is bringing a large amount of traffic and conversions to a website, and if that blog accidentally got missed in the redirection process, they may consequently lose that traffic!
- Make sure Analytics stays up and running correctly during the migration process.
You could’ve done everything right, but if your Analytics has not been implemented properly, then how will you know? We’ve seen so many website migrations where the web developer forgot to install Analytics and the client ended up with a big gap in their Analytics data, which then messes up any future analysis of overall trends.
- Don’t let title tags & meta descriptions get forgotten.
If you have ever had anyone doing your SEO for you, they have likely spent a lot of time painstakingly ensuring your website has relevant and high performing title tags & meta descriptions (I say this from experience!) and it’s heartbreaking when a new website goes live and all their hard work is lost. Make sure all of this data is brought across from the old site (where appropriate) to the new one. This is a really important one.
- Make sure all content on your new site is HTTPS
You can buy an SSL certificate and think that you have a full, compliant, HTTPS website but this isn’t always the case…. Have you checked your images, old-as-the-hills blog content and case studies? Having a HTTPS page with an HTTP image or link can harm your rankings, as all URLs being served over HTTPS is now regarded as best practice by Google.
- Make sure your site is going to be just as fast, or even faster, once the migration has taken place.
When a new website is being made live, often it will be moving from one server to another. Alternatively it might have a lot of extra images or functionality. There’s a chance that the new website or server will be slower, and therefore your new website might look good…. but does it take 50% longer to load?! No thanks. Speed is a ranking factor, so this may affect your rankings once Google gets around to crawling your website again and realises it’s nowhere near as fast as it used to be.
SEO horror story, anyone? 👻
In case these suggestions aren’t enough to warn you, we’ve read up on some SEO horror stories to scare ourselves into making sure we do our job properly! It’s an exciting & informative read – hopefully you can see where we’re coming from when we tell you the importance of a good SEO migration.
On a less fear-inducing note, we know that sometimes things do go wrong…. If needed, we’re here to help fix these issues, or if you commission us to build your new website we can make sure that these issues don’t appear in the first place.
We like to think that’s one of the best reasons to use a specialist agency, as we have the web dev and design skills to design and build you a beautiful website, and the SEO & UX (User Experience) skills to make sure it performs well in search engines and converts well into enquiries. What more could you want?
Are you looking for a website design, build & SEO migration service? Or even just looking for some help to fix your SEO? Find out more about how we could help you.
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