SEO Migrations
Protect and maintain your organic search performance.
Our team of SEO website migration experts will help you to protect and maintain your organic search performance as part of a website rebuild project or a domain migration.
Website migration and SEO
Incorporate SEO at every stage of your website migration to protect and grow your organic traffic.
Website migration projects are complicated. There’s a lot of work to do and endless tasks to keep track of and SEO is often bottom of the list of priorities.
The impact that website or domain migrations can have on organic search performance is immense. Any errors left unchecked or redirects left off, can have serious business consequences.
To ensure your organic performance is maintained, SEO should be a consideration from the outset, and we have designed a SEO website migration process that will help you protect your search performance.
If you have an upcoming website migration project then do get in touch so we can discuss the level of SEO support your domain would need.
Protect your rankings
Obtaining SEO migration support gives you a greater chance of retaining your current rankings when your new site goes live.
Update your website confidently
When your new site goes live we run checks on the day to identify any potential issues so they can be resolved with minimal impact to performance.
Grow your traffic
Our SEO team works with you to identify changes that will be beneficial to organic performance, and help grow your organic traffic in the long-term.
Our SEO team specializes in website migrations
Based in the heart of London, we are a digital agency with years of experience in running and overseeing SEO migration projects.
A website migration can be very complex. Our SEO team will work with you to make sure that the changes to your website, whether they be a redesign or a domain change, do not impact your rankings in the search results. We work with you to mitigate the risks.
We’ve worked on many migration projects with multiple Finn Partners teams involved; not just our SEO team. We can provide a package that provides a full website migration service. We’ll design, develop and optimize your new website with the expertise of our web design and web development and SEO teams.
Our website migration SEO services
The support we provide you depends on the complexity of the migration project and your budget. However, our SEO migration service can be broken down into three stages.
Pre-migration SEO
Pre-migration covers the period leading up to the migration launch day. This is the development phase of the migration project, and the period where SEO input is most effective.
Migration day SEO
These are the checks run the day your migration goes live. We go through a priority list of technical factors to check website health and make sure there is nothing that could block or cause issue with the crawling and indexing of your site.
Post-migration SEO
This covers 4-6 weeks after the migration goes live. During this period we let the dust settle and monitor your site’s organic performance, including the traffic and ranking positions for priority keywords.
A website migration is completely bespoke, no two are the same. For us to best evaluate what your needs are, get in touch today with some details about your migration project.
We can take on your full website migration project
Managing multiple teams can be overwhelming in a migration. We offer more than SEO migration services. We can support on the entire project, providing a tailored solution that meets your project’s requirements.
As part of a full migration project we can provide web design, web development, SEO and web hosting services. We can even run paid media activity when the new site launches to help cover any initial traffic drops to other channels, or promotions through social media management.
Regardless of whether you opt for SEO migration services only, or want cross-services project, communication with you will be seamless. Your account manager is your central point of contact. It’s their responsibility to oversee the project and liaise between the different teams, reporting back to you with progress updates.
How our agency can help you
Including SEO considerations from the start of the project is key to preventing any losses to your rankings and visibility in the search results.
A website migration can entail a wide spectrum of changes. It can even cover multiple changes in a single project. Migrations we offer guidance and support for include:
Domain migration
This migration type is where you’re updating your site’s domain name. For example, it might be changing from www.oldsite.co.uk to www.newsite.co.uk.
Whether your site is re-branding, or you’re moving to a more optimal domain name, we provide SEO support to help make the transition process smoother. We can also help with setting up analytics tracking for the new domain so you have data from the moment you change over.
Subdomain migration
Subdomain migrations are where content that sits on a subdomain is moving back onto the main domain, usually into a subfolder. This might look like example.site.co.uk to site.co.uk/example.
Merging content back onto the main domain is already beneficial to SEO, with main domains outperforming subdomains in the search results. We work with you so you can really capitalize on this SEO opportunity, by ensuring SEO is being introduced throughout your migration process.
CMS migration
This is a back-end update where your site is gaining a new content management system (CMS).
Our SEO team will be on hand to make sure your updates to the CMS have no impact on tracking or front-end performance.
Protocol migration
Where your site is moving from HTTP to HTTPS. Google prefers to rank HTTPS over HTTP sites in the search results nowadays. Most sites are on HTTPS now, but there are still HTTP sites out there.
With a protocol migration the redirects are top priority. We’ll make sure redirects are in place, pointing to the right page and functioning.
Structure migration
A structure migration is where you’re planning changes to the structural features of your website. This can be changes to the site architecture, URL structure, internal links and navigation menu.
We’ll work with you on any changes to the structure of your site. Keeping content accessible is crucial, so our recommendations focus on making sure the final structure is logical, easy to navigate and keeps your priority pages front and centre for your audience.
Content migration
A content migration is where you plan to make significant content changes to the website, whether it be the creation, consolidation or removal of content.
We’ll look at the content you want to remove and change and create a plan based on your content’s performance in search. We’ll help you get rid of poorly performing content and help preserve content that brings in traffic and conversions.
Design migration
When the website gets an updated skin and layout, usually done to modernize websites and improve user experience.
We’ll work with the design team to make sure your wireframes provide strong UX and take into considerations SEO best practices.
Our approach to SEO for website migrations
Every migration project starts with a chat. This helps us get to know you, your website, your budget and what you’re looking to achieve. Following this, we can start to develop an idea of the SEO support your migration needs.
To get an idea, here is a breakdown of the different tasks that can be covered at the different stages of a migration.
Pre-migration tasks
Data benchmarking
We need to know how your website currently performs. To help keep performance on track throughout the migration, we set a performance benchmark for your data. Looking at platforms like Google Search Console and Google Analytics, we run an analysis of your site’s traffic and keyword performance to understand what it’s ranking for and in which position. We also note the ranking URL; this is particularly useful when a migration includes content changes.
URL mapping
Where URLs are changing, whether pages are moving or being removed, redirects are crucial. You want to make it as easy as you can for Google to see where your content is following a migration. We work with you to develop URL mapping documentation, as well as provide recommendations on changes to URL structuring to keep SEO at the forefront.
Site information architecture review
We review where changes to the site architecture are suggested. We want to make sure planned structural changes aim to improve navigation and make the site easier to access.
Content analysis and plan
Often, when content changes are planned into a migration they are happening en masse. Significant content changes can have a big impact to your ranking performance, so we work with you to develop a content plan that ensures priority rankings are unaffected in the long-run.
Staging site review
Once it’s ready we’ll crawl the staging site and identify any technical issues to be fixed ahead of deployment. Checking the staging site helps reduce the risk of potential issues occurring on launch day.
Migration day tasks
On the day checks, which include crawling and reviewing:
- Redirects
- Site indexation
- Canonical tags
- Analytics tracking
- 404s
Where we find errors with any of these technical factors we contact your dev team immediately to get them resolved as a priority. This is to make sure there are no obstacles that could impact site accessibility for search engines and users.
For new domains we also set up and verify a new Google Search Console property. Where we identify any technical issues, we’ll be in contact with you and your Dev team to get them resolved.
Post-migration tasks
Performance monitoring for priority keywords and pages. We’ll let you know as other teething issues arise so they can be dealt with.
With priority factors checked on migration day, in the following days we’ll check the remaining technical factors:
- Meta data
- Structured Data
- Page Speed
- Internal redirects