SEO consultation for website migration

What results can you expect?

The assistance of an expert SEO agency during this kind of process can help you minimise the risks associated with a website migration: loss of popularity and authority; loss of organic, direct or referral traffic…

A website migration is always an incredibly delicate process. Hard-earned high rankings and organic traffic can be jeopardised if any changes whatsoever are made to the URL addresses making up your website. The most typical scenarios include domain changes, content management system changes, HTTPS implementation, launch of international versions, changes in the information architecture…

At Human Level we have expert SEO consultants who can advise, supervise and direct website migration processes to achieve optimal results, as our agency has participated in numerous migrations of websites using different technologies, with all kinds of dimensions and requirements, in a wide variety of scenarios.

The correct execution of a website migration implies minimising its impact on organic rankings, maintaining its previous authority and popularity indicators, and leaving the website in top conditions to continue improving its positioning in search engines.

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Application scenarios of an SEO consultation for website migrations

Domain changes

Most commonly, it happens during merging of domains, incorporation of content acquired from third-party domains, migration to premium domains, changes in the brand or company names.

Content management system (CMS) changes

A platform change frequently entails changes in the URL syntax of a website. Even if our domain doesn’t change, we need to plan a migration of all URLs from our old CMS to URLs of the new content manager.

Server technology changes

Changes in server technology frequently require updating file name extensions (for example, from .php pages to .aspx or .jsp pages), which also implies changes in URL addresses.

Migration to a secure service protocol

The migration from http to https requires the adoption of a secure server, and thus it requires migrating URLs.

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What does a website migration entail?

If a page changes its URL address –due to a change in its architecture, content management system or server technology– next time the search engine attempts to visit this page requesting the old URL address to the server, it won’t find the page and will return a 404 “not found” error. When a search engine gets several consecutive 404 errors from one particular URL, it will determine that this page doesn’t exist any more, and it will delete it from its index. If this page enjoyed good rankings for various search queries, once its URL is deleted from the search engine’s index, it won’t appear in the search results any more, and it will stop receiving traffic.

On the other hand, links pointing to this page from other websites get broken, i.e., they point to a URL address that no longer exists. This has two immediate consequences:

Visitors landing on the page by clicking on these links will now land on a non-existent page and will receive a 404 not found error message.
Broken links are no longer relevant with regards to the page’s popularity, and by extension, to the domain in general.

Last, but not least, visitors who had saved the URL address in their browser’s bookmarks intending to visit it again will also get a 404 error message.

All of this results in a dramatic decline in traffic from search engines, referral websites and direct visits.

What is the goal of an SEO consultation for website migration?

The results an SEO consultation for website migration aims to achieve are:

To make the migration process as quick as possible, minimising ranking losses.
To successfully transfer the popularity and authority from the old website to new URLs.
To recover the majority of existing inbound links with good authority.
Ensure that direct, referral and organic traffic do not suffer.

How will Human Level help you to achieve this?

An SEO consultation for website migration aims to correctly plan and execute the process of updating URL addresses on your website, in order to avoid that your rankings in search engines suffer dramatic drops, with the consequent loss of organic traffic.

Human Level will carry out a preliminary analysis of the current scenario to adequately plan the migration process: which tasks must be executed, in what order and who will be responsible for each of them.

We will also take notice of the website’s performance indicators, so that we can compare the results before and after the migration.

The migration process requires full coordination between the website’s development or maintenance team and its server management personnel, because the order in which each of these tasks are undertaken is essential for a successful migration.

The SEO consultation for website migration also includes the identification of all source URL addresses, as well as target URLs towards which redirections must be made. We will also analyse and define the correct strategy to program these redirections.

And finally, Human Level will make up an inventory of the most important inbound links and devise a strategy to try and recover as many as possible.

The migration process is completed with an additional extraction of indicators to evaluate the impact of the migration and its level of success.

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