SEO Migration Services
We work with some of the biggest companies in the world, including the likes of eBay, KAYAK, SIXT, and momondo, as well as other top brands like Reebok, Zalando, and adidas.
Website Migration Experts
Don’t adapt and die – protect your website investment with SEO migration
The whole endeavor of website migration can be fraught with risk, let’s put that straight out there. One of the biggest risks you run is that if you don’t also do SEO migration, you will lose all your website’s SEO track record, credibility, and authority that you’ve built through constant hard work. The nightmare scenario is that your company loses all the benefits your hard-earned SEO gains, along with the traffic and revenue it supplies.
Website migration involves a myriad of changes, some large-scale, others relatively tiny. It can include anything from changing your website’s domain (its URL or address) or migrating your entire website to a new backend server with different features, to changing your content management system. It can also be a rejig of your website’s information architecture to improve usability, changing the entire structure of your site, or simply overhauling your top navigation system.
What does SEO migration involve?
Just as there are many elements to website migration, SEO migration has many facets. It begins by following standard best practice recommendations for website migration itself, including doing it in careful phases rather than in one brand new relaunch. This helps to minimize the disruption that Google has to deal with, effectively drip-feeding its changes. This allows it to adjust far more effectively to your changes.
Pre-migration sandboxing is necessary for a thorough QA of the SEO migration plan. At this point, it’s a good idea to use a web crawling tool that mimics the way Google’s web-crawler operates and to analyze the results carefully for anomalies and technical red flags.
Another very important aspect of SEO migration is to map all your old web page URLs to the new ones you’ve created, using 403 redirect instructions on each page. One also needs to be ultra-careful not to duplicate any content in the process of moving many web pages across into a new system, as Google can penalize this heavily.
The website’s performance needs to be minutely monitored in Google Analytics to detect any indications of looming negative changes in response to the site migration, which also requires benchmarking all your previous analytics.
Why is SEO migration so crucial?
To quickly appreciate the importance of SEO migration, you simply have to imagine what website migration must look like from Google’s point of view. A “new” website seems to appear, complete with a new URL, a different page structure, and often totally rewritten content.
To all intents and purposes, this website has no track record at all with Google. As far as the search engine is concerned, this is a brand-new website. Of course, there are technical ways of informing Google of your domain transfer, which will help it to understand that this website is still yours.
The problem is that the changes are usually of such a magnitude that all the previous metrics that Google has applied to index and rank your website no longer match your new website. Thus, like any diligent search engine, it starts to analyze your website from scratch, sending you back to square one with your SEO, and rendering all your previous SEO spend a waste.
Thus, it’s not so much that you need to consider SEO migration. The reality is that if you don’t implement it the results can be catastrophic for your website and your online return on investment.
Why should I use Key Content for SEO migration?
It will be clear by now that SEO migration, done meticulously, can be a huge undertaking. This is why it’s best left to specialists rather than divert your own resources. Key Content has 12 years of SEO experience at the highest level. We work with large multinational companies like KAYAK, adidas, and SIXT in some of the most competitive online industries.
Our depth of expertise and wealth of experience mean you can trust us not to overlook anything in your SEO migration, helping you to significantly reduce or eliminate SEO ranking problems caused by website migration.
