Site migrations are necessary at times, but rankings and traffic can drop if you're not careful. At SMX Next, Bruce Clay showed how marketers can ensure SEO success during site migrations.
“Migration is a burden that we all have with websites,” said SEO industry leader Bruce Clay at SMX Next. “We have to upgrade them periodically. A stale or an out-of-date website deteriorates your rankings in the search engines.”
“There are all sorts of reasons to do it — maybe you have an e-commerce platform or just need an upgrade,” he added.
Design upgrades, domain changes for a rebrand or necessary website merges can all necessitate a website migration. But, with so many moving pieces, the potential for errors — both from a ranking perspective and a site functionality standpoint — can increase if site owners and SEOs aren’t prepared.
Here are some of the most important do’s and don’ts Clay recommends SEOs consider when migrating a website.
What to do when migrating a website
There are many tasks involved when migrating a site, but the following are critical for preserving your rankings.
Make an inventory of old URLs. Before beginning the migration process, marketers and site owners should put together a list of all their current URLs. This will establish a baseline to use as a comparison with the new site. Clay pointed out that running this inventory will inevitably uncover URL errors such as 400/500 status codes or redirect chains, so marketers should make note of these before the...
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