Tech-focused SEO
Using technical SEO to make a website Google-friendly and gain rankings in a saturated market.
Website Migration Services
Migrating your website can be a time-consuming and complex process. Not only do you have to manage the technical elements of your site migration, but if you’re not careful, it can massively affect your website’s SEO performance.
At The SEO Works, we offer website migration services that have a focus on SEO, allowing for you to smoothly migrate your website, without having to worry about losing your hard-earned keyword rankings. Our team of knowledgeable web migration specialists will be on-hand to support you through the migration process, from an SEO perspective. Helping you with different technical and content elements that need addressing in a website migration.
Preserve Your Rankings
Maintaining a top position in the search engines is challenging, and a website migration adds further to this challenge.
An improperly executed migration can cause your site to vanish from the search results, ruin your site authority, undermine your SEO efforts, and potentially significantly impact your site’s traffic and conversions.
This happens because site migrations can alter how search engines perceive your site, disrupting established authority and indexing signals. Fortunately, with careful planning and knowledge, our SEO migration services will help minimise ranking fluctuations and achieve the desired traffic boost.
Why Do You Need SEO Website Migration Services?
Migrating a website is one of the riskiest projects from an SEO point of view. Here’s why SEO migration services will help minimise the risk.
Seamless Website Migration
Websites accumulate valuable data over time, from top-performing content, such as blog posts and landing pages, to critical site structures such as internal links and sub-folders. Losing some of this data during a migration can severely impact your online performance, which can take a long time to recover from.
By using our website migration services, you can leave moving your website in the hands of professionals. Our team of migration experts will be able to ensure a successful migration, by seamlessly transferring essential data. As a professional SEO migration service provider, we have a meticulous process for migrating websites smoothly, including auditing, redirecting, benchmarking, launching, testing, tracking, and reporting.
Improve Website Performance
One of the major benefits of a website migration is that it offers a great opportunity to build your site from the ground up, ensuring that it is technically sound and has a fast site speed. By choosing to partner with an SEO migration service provider, you can ensure focus on a strong technical foundation, which is key to SEO and maintaining your ranking during a migration.
Move Away From a Difficult or Unintuitive CMS
If your current website uses a content management system (CMS) that is difficult or unintuitive to use, it can be incredibly frustrating to upload new content, or make changes to the existing pages. In addition to this, it can be restrictive in terms of making any technical changes, such as editing the metadata, altering the header structure, or implementing redirects. This ultimately makes it much harder, or impossible, to follow the best practices for organic SEO, to maximise your site’s visibility.
As a professional website migration services provider, our team is very familiar with many content management systems, and the process of migrating from one to another. Our experts will be able to recommend which CMS, themes, and plugins will best suit the needs of your site, providing you with everything you need to easily upload content and update your site.
Implement a Logical Site Structure
Having a logical site structure in place serves as a strong foundation for any website. A poor site structure can make it difficult for search engines like Google to effectively crawl the site, and understand the relationship between different pages. In addition to this, a poor site structure can make it harder for users to navigate easily through the site, which can result in them leaving the site in frustration.
By working with our web migration team, you can ensure that the site you are migrating to will utilise a site structure that makes navigation for both users and search engines much easier. This will include implementing elements such as sub-folders, navigation menus, and any other structural elements that may be needed, such as subdomains, if the site needs it.
Our Website Migration Service Success Stories
Take a look through some of our SEO migration services case studies, highlighting some of the great work our web team has done for our clients when it comes to migrating their sites.
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Our Website Migration Services Process
Pre-Migration
Because a site migration is a complex process, being thoroughly prepared and organised is crucial for seeing success. We start our web migration services process begins with a comprehensive audit and analysis of your current site, including:
- Benchmarking current keyword rankings and backlinks
- Benchmarking current traffic, conversions, and site speed
- Crawl the site for a full list of URLs of the current site
- Identifying the most influential links within the site’s backlink profile that will need updating
- Creating a redirect map for the site, using 301 redirects to ensure the user experience isn’t impacted, and no links are lost.
By being thorough with the above checks, our SEO migration services team can ensure that there is a smooth transition between sites, making sure that the user experience isn’t impacted by encountering 404 pages, or that no backlinks to the site are lost.
This benchmarking stage also provides us with accurate comparison data, allowing us to measure how the new site performs across many key areas.
Migrating Your Site
Even with a solid plan in place, it is crucial that this stage of the migration process is done correctly, as any errors can result in disruptions in your site’s SEO performance.
Some of the tasks that are key to safeguarding your site’s SEO include:
Implementing Redirects
Using the redirect map we create during the pre-migration process, our web migration team will make sure that 301 redirects are implemented for any old URLs. By implementing redirects, we can ensure that any link equity is passed onto relevant pages, helping to preserve the authority of your website.
Submitting a New Sitemap
Creating and submitting a new XML sitemap for the new version of your website will help search engines to crawl the site and understand the relationships between pages. In addition to this, submitting an up to date sitemap to Google Search Console can help make the page crawling and indexing process from Google much faster.
Testing URLs and Navigation
In order to provide a thorough SEO migration service, our team carries out extensive manual tests of the new site’s URLs and navigation menus, as well as the validity of canonical tags. This ensures that users and search engines can navigate through and interact with the site correctly, with a focus on making sure that the user experience is smooth.
Reviewing Site Performance
One of the most important jobs that our SEO migration services team do when a website has just been migrated, is to monitor and review the new site’s performance immediately after launch. This is so that we can gauge if the new site is performing as we’d expect across key metrics, such as conversions and organic traffic. A large difference from the pre-migration benchmarking could indicate that there is an issue that needs to be addressed.
Post-Migration
Once the migration has completed, the next steps are to monitor performance, and test that everything is working as intended. As we have a heavy SEO focus as part of our website migration services, this will include assessing several key SEO aspects, such as keyword rankings.
The key checks that our migration team will carry out include:
- Checking that each page on the site can be crawled and indexed, keeping an eye out for any 404 errors or groups of pages not being indexed.
- Making sure that all the redirects have been implemented correctly, sending the users to the correct pages, as well as checking for any errors like redirect loops.
- Comparing the keyword rankings of the site post-migration, to the benchmarked data we recorded pre-migration. This will highlight any priority areas that will need to be looked into and optimised first.
- Reviewing the backlink profile of the website post-migration, as this will highlight any backlinks that haven’t successfully been redirected to a relevant page, which is key for retaining domain authority.
- Continually monitoring organic traffic after the migration has been completed, and comparing it to the benchmarked data we record pre-migration. This will highlight potential areas that could be impacting the user engagement on the site.
Why Use Our SEO Migration Services?
Expertise and In-Depth Knowledge
Partnering with an SEO website migration service provider means gaining access to their vast knowledge and industry experience. A website migration is a multifaceted process that demands specialised attention and expertise at every step, especially when trying to preserve your SEO efforts. Our team brings together a diverse range of skills to ensure a smooth and effective transition for your website.
If your account manager encounters an unfamiliar issue, they can speak with other specialists on our team who possess the necessary expertise. This guarantees that you’ll always receive the most reliable advice and recommendations for your website migration and preserving your rankings.
SEO Focused Website Migrations
Our website migration services are not only made up of a team of experienced web developers, but also the knowledge of our SEO agency team members. Because of this, we can offer a unique service that focuses heavily on not just migrating your website, but making sure your rankings and domain authority survive the move.
Our SEO team will be able to make recommendations for both the content and technical aspects of your website, so that your new site will not just preserve your rankings, but follow best practices to help boost them in the long run.
Communication
At The SEO Works, we prioritise providing clear and transparent communication with our clients above all else. We believe this is crucial for building relationships with our clients, and fostering a smooth workflow. A website migration is a collaborative process between your internal teams and our specialists, so regular meetings and updates are all part of the service.
Industry-Leading Tools and Software
To make sure that our SEO migration services are always providing the best results as possible, we make sure that our team uses the most effective tools and technologies available. This approach ensures that we consistently achieve the best outcomes for our clients.
What Our Clients Have to Say
Speak To The Team
Are you wondering if your website would benefit from a migration? Get in touch with us today, to arrange a chat with one of our team. We’ll be happy to talk about the migration process and how it could be beneficial for your SEO efforts and organic growth.
Website Migration Service FAQs
What types of website migrations are there?
There are multiple different types of website migrations that can be done, which will have differing impacts on your website. The best practices and advice for each migration will differ, which is why support from a website migration service provider is helpful. The different types of migration are:
- Changing Your Domain Name: Updating your domain name as part of a rebranding effort. This involves transferring your entire website to the new domain and managing the transition to ensure minimal disruption and a smooth rebranding process.
- Revamping Site Structure, Navigation, or Design: Updating your site’s design or improving its structure and navigation to ensure better search engine crawling and indexing, especially if the current setup is hindering these processes.
- Transitioning to a New Framework or CMS: Moving to a different framework or content management system to boost your site’s performance, security, or functionality. A new system can provide enhanced features and capabilities.
- Optimising for Mobile Devices: Ensuring your site is fully compatible with mobile devices is crucial for user experience and search engine rankings. This includes adapting your site for tablets and smartphones.
- Migrating from HTTP to HTTPS: Switching from HTTP to HTTPS to enhance visitor security and privacy. HTTPS encrypts data and reduces security warnings, fostering greater trust and confidence among users.
- Transferring to a New Server: Moving to a different web hosting provider to improve site speed and performance, especially if your site is growing. A faster site benefits both visitors and search engines, leading to better user experiences and higher search rankings.
Does a website migration impact SEO?
A website migration will impact a site’s SEO, although depending on how the migration is handled, these effects can be both positive and negative. The reason why a web migration can impact SEO so much is because when migrating a site, there are usually major foundational changes made to the site, such as the site/URL structure, implementation of subdomains, or swapping to a new CMS or server.
Migrations are a complex process, especially when trying to preserve a website’s keyword rankings and domain authority. Working with an experienced website migration service provider should help to minimise any SEO impact on your site, and ensure a much smoother migration process.
What can go wrong with a website migration?
If a website migration is not done properly, there are several areas that can go wrong, which can have serious impacts on the SEO performance of your website. Some of the most common challenges are:
- Not having redirects implemented correctly, or at all, which can result in a loss of traffic, decrease keyword rankings, and see the site drive less conversions.
- The relevant tracking codes, such as Google Analytics, are knocked off the website, results in a loss of data. This can make it hard to know how successful your migration was.
- Optimised content or metadata needs re-uploading to the site, which can result in a drop in traffic and keyword rankings, as well as taking up a lot of time.
- Crawling and indexing issues, such as noindex tags being in place on key pages, or the new site taking a long time to be indexed.
- The new site not being tested when it goes live, which can result in poor functionality, leading to a poor user experience or technical performance.
All of the above can easily be avoided by working with an SEO migration service provider, who specialises in smooth website migration that retains your site’s SEO performance.