A case study shows that a company worked on an e-commerce site with 300,000 indexed pages multiple times over ten years. The website’s structure underwent numerous changes, and the result was disastrous, for the shift in the system gave rise to several bugs such as multiple redirects, orphaned pages, and 404 errors. The challenge is avoiding bug migration to the latest website version. The solution is the implementation of SEO techniques to identify technical issues and prioritize their resolution.
When web migration is not processed right it can give rise to several problems like a drop in organic traffic triggered by broken internal links, bad redirects, etc.
So, can strategic SEO save the website owner’s time and money during a website migration? Let’s discuss that in the post.
Table of Contents
What is an SEO Strategy?
An SEO strategy is the best way to ensure your website’s success. It’s a way to plan ahead and ensure you’re doing everything possible to optimize your site to be visible on top of search engines. But what if you’re already in the midst of a migration? Don’t worry! You can still benefit from an SEO strategy by hiring a local seo company.
Understanding Redirects
Redirects are essential for SEO but aren’t as straightforward to understand as you think. You’ll want to use them whenever your website needs to be updated or moved.
Redirects are the easiest way for search engines to follow your site’s new location on the web. That way, when someone performs searches on Google, Bing, or any other search engine, the search engine will direct them straight toward the new URL instead of having their query sent back where it came from—which would cause a lot of confusion!
Suppose you’ve tried navigating through one of those old URLs without success and ended up looking at some random page instead. In that case, this is probably why: The old links didn’t take users anywhere useful anymore because they’d been redirected away from their original destination by those black-numbers-and-letters of the error message stating 301 Moved Permanently.
Maintaining Ranking Within Search Engines
Maintaining the ranking within search engines is one of the essential parts of a website migration. Your business will be relying on Google and other major search engines to help find customers, and if you don’t do your best to keep their interest up-to-date with your content and rankings, it could cost you money in lost sales.
It’s easy for those who aren’t familiar with how internal links work (or even what they are) to get caught up in the mechanics of ranking higher on Google. But if we take a step back for a moment and look at it from an outsider’s perspective: What is SEO? How can it help us as marketers? And how can we use these principles as part of our own strategy when migrating sites?
Advantages of a Clean Migration
The advantages of a clean migration are numerous. You can avoid duplicate content, links and titles, meta descriptions, images, and pages. It will help you create an optimized website quickly and easily.
Google provides insights about how they react to web migration and advice on how to perform site migration as follows:
Redirect all the old URLs to the new ones, also update all internal mentions such as:
- links
- forms
- structured data
- sitemaps
- and the Robots.txt file
Prioritize Your Keywords
Before you begin your website migration, you must understand that keywords are the foundation of any successful SEO strategy. Keywords are critical for helping your website rank higher in search engines and will determine how many users find it through organic search results.
The first step in determining which keywords you should prioritize is identifying the content of your site and considering what goals they would serve if optimized for each keyword:
- Are these items relevant enough? If not, then there isn’t much value being created by targeting those terms—or at least not as much weight as there could be if you optimize them further.
Track Domain Authority
Domain authority is a ranking factor that measures how much traffic to your website comes from organic search results. SEO experts often use it to determine what keywords are relevant and should be included in the title, meta description, or URL of a page so that you can get more visitors.
You can track this data using tools like Google Search Console or Webmaster Tools, but you can use Google Analytics if you want to do it manually. You’ll want to look at desktop and mobile traffic data for each keyword phrase used on your site—and how well they’re performing compared with other related terms (which will help you identify opportunities).
Design a Plan
As a web developer, you’ll want to ensure that your website migration will be as easy and quick as possible. To achieve that, it’s necessary to have a plan before you start. The first thing you should include in this plan is the right tools available for the job. If you don’t have them already or aren’t able to afford them yet, then now would be a good time for them!
Since you have done all that, let’s move on to our next step, which involves ensuring the strategic planning of our website migration strategy so that we can get started on migrating our sites safely with minimal errors.
While some people might be under the impression that SEO is only necessary for large businesses, the significant benefit it offers website owners is that it can save you time and money during a website migration. The strategy works because most companies have multiple websites, meaning they will have to deal with content on each site.
Conclusion
Strategic SEO saves time and money during migration because it allows for optimizing each page for search engines rather than having separate pages. The amount of time and money you can save with an SEO strategy is immeasurable, and we’re excited to see how it contributes to the success of your migration project!