Do you have an online business and a corresponding website for your online brand? If yes, then chances are at one point of time you will have to rework your site altogether. And this rework can happen in many ways! For instance, you might want to update your present website. Alternatively, you might also want to buy a brand-new domain. Regardless of what you plan to do, it’s imperative to prepare before time. Else you might have to come across SEO hassles.
Additionally, any website re-launch, especially ones that comprise of a domain change, can remove the online footprint of a brand. It might also affect the online search-driven sales. So, exercising adequate security measures and organization is essential at the time of a website migration. It’s necessary to secure the search equity that you’ve worked upon for all these days. Alternatively, you can also come up with fresh new optimization scopes by planning the transition or website migration strategically. It will help you enhance your website performance and also offer you digital dominance.
Today, if you live in NYC, you can reach out to a reputable Brooklyn SEO Company and other similar SEO agencies for professional guidance and help. That aside, some of the SEO strategies that are helpful for website migration are as follows:
Evaluate all inbound links
The inbound links assist in creating page search authority. And as your URL’s change, the backlinks which tally with your online content should also get updated. Hence, conduct an audit of the inbound links. It will help you understand and outline your link profile. After this, you’ll be able to set up a page list that needs to get reclaimed. After that, you can sort the outcomes by sites along with the highest domain relevance and authority. The direct links too are preferable than the redirected links. It’s because they have fewer moving parts. It offers a clear and faster content path.
Ideally speaking, it’s essential that you get in touch with the webmaster hosting every link that points to your website. You can also request them to update the URL. However, if this seems impossible to attend due to webmaster unavailability and several links, you can conserve your entire link cluster by setting up 301 redirects that indicate the old URL’s to brand new ones.
On the other hand, if you are buying a brand-new URL that earlier was hosting any other brand’s site, know that you will sometimes inherit their back-link profile. You can also update the same for removing or preserving the connections as required.
Get an SEO audit done
When you carry out an SEO audit, it can recognize the weaknesses, risks, opportunities, strengths as well as other aspects of your website. You can make use of this knowledge to set up a roadmap of what needs to be added on and also what should get left behind. You can also look for places where your brand might enhance its online presence and its content. You can also address the backend optimization and execute the changes in your website update. The factors and aspects that you need to keep an eye for during your SEO audit are as follows:
- Page titles less than 200 pixels
- Missing page titles
- Canonical tags
- Multiple H1 tags
- Duplicate H1 tags
- Meta descriptions more than 923 pixels
- Page titles more than 512 pixels
- Missing H1 tags
- Duplicate meta descriptions
- Missing meta descriptions
- Duplicate page titles
Select the web pages that have the highest organic traffic
You need to pay proper attention to the web pages that have their inbound links. It helps to promote online rankings. The incoming links are useful in sending viewers from another website to your online business site. At the time of website migration, you might alter the URL structure, and this might result in inbound links loss. Do you want to identify some of the most connected links? If yes you can resort to Google Search Console, previously know as Google Webmaster Tools. After this, you can download the document in a CSV format.
You need to set up the 301 redirects
Simply put, this step comprises of creating temporary 301 redirects. And it merely redirects your old website page to the brand new one. To avert all kinds of mistakes, it’s essential that you create the manual 301 redirects of all necessary pages. You might also want to leave all the pages that have very little importance. And all your ranks will get transferred to your brand-new website. Also, it alerts Google that your site has undergone a change and has shifted to some other address.
Monitor the ranks
Almost all of the search results that are present in the web search engine usually comprise of four or more words. And today, it’s all about ranking the keywords. You need to collect as much data as possible. Also, assess the keywords and start to check which of them are essential and can get you more visitors. Also, check the ones that will not bring you any visitors. Additionally, make use of Google Analytics or any other tool in this stage. Go ahead and track the rankings and also find the incompetent parts of your website.
When you follow all these necessary steps of website migration, you’ll see there’s nothing you need to be afraid of.
Crawl the new website
Carrying out and fixing a performance test, even in a second’s delay, might increase overall customer satisfaction by almost 16%. It’s essential that you don’t miss out on this part. It is always beneficial to crawl the new website for all the broken links and the 404’s. You can make use of Search Console tools and check for flaws in your new website and also resolve them one by one. Otherwise, you’ll find your ranks to be affected hugely. All this helps to impact the site indexation.
As you progress through your online marketing journey, website migration is a reality that might occur. It’s essential to manage this entire process efficiently and with complete security. Discussed above were six smart and useful SEO strategies that you can implement during your website migration.
